The Paul Wells Show - Scott Anderson on the Revolution in Iran

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Veteran foreign correspondent Scott Anderson, who's written for the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and Esquire, has a new book, King of Kings, about the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the ayatollahs in 1979. He opens with a big claim: that the Iranian revolution changed the world as much as the revolutions in France, the United States or Russia. He tells Paul about the failure of two leaders — the Shah and President Jimmy Carter — to understand what was happening in Iran. 

This week, blundering through history, when the stakes couldn't be higher. My interview with Scott Anderson on his new book about the Iranian Revolution. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. Here's the big claim in the new book, King of Kings, for my guest this week. the award-winning author and journalist Scott Anderson. If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works,

to the American, French, and Russian revolutions might be added the Iranian. Anderson's book is about the Iranian Revolution of 1979. So talking about it takes us pretty far from this podcast's usual territory. I think it's a trip worth taking. What Anderson is claiming, after all, is that the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran changed everything, not just in the Middle East, not just in the Muslim world, but everywhere and forever, which means it helped make the world we live in today. Second, any event that's big enough makes echoes that ring down to today.

King of Kings is about a distant corner at a distant time, but it's also about how leaders lead and the big mistakes that they can make. All of Anderson's central characters, the Shah, Jimmy Carter, watching from the White House, and the Ayatollah Khomeini watching from exile in France, had an imperfect understanding of events and a tiny circle of advisors. The United States in particular had spent the 1970s putting more and more eggs in the Iranian basket without really having the faintest idea what went on in that country. But it turns out the Shah was barely any better informed. That's because in both countries, leaders had built up elaborate systems to block out bad news, until the bad news

became too loud to ignore. It's a fascinating story. It has lessons for anyone trying to lead in complex times. Here's my conversation with Scott Anderson. Scott Anderson, thank you for joining me. My pleasure. Thank you. One has one's own reason for writing a book, but one also has expectations of the audience. You're putting quite a brick on the agenda of the American reading public. Why is it time for a book about the Iranian Revolution now? I feel that really the Iranian Revolution was one of the most seminal events, certainly of my lifetime.

It was the downfall of one of the United States most important foreign alliances. And it really kind of heralded this, it brought about this surge of religious nationalism that you're seeing not just in Islam, but you're seeing in virtually every faith around the world. And it certainly colored, it radically transformed the Middle East. I've been a foreign correspondent for a number of years and just spent most of my time in the Middle East because of all the wars and stuff there. And I really feel so much of it has stemmed from both American reaction to the Iranian Revolution and just the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, surgence of religious fervor that's happened throughout the region.

After 9-1-1, we heard a lot about the Arab Street. You can argue that the Iranian Revolution is the first time the Persian Street won after sort of several misfires through the 60s. And in winning, it sort of opened the door for the street all over the place, many different kinds of street to sort of start to feel its outs and become more assertive. That's one of the early claims of your book. Right. I think that's that's absolutely true. And certainly you see it very prominently in the Middle East, but I think you see this this resurgence of religious nationalism all over the world. Even in Buddhism, in

Sri Lanka, but you see it with Hindus, Hindu nationalists against Muslims in India. Jewish settlers in Israel, Palestine, in the United States with the Christian nationalists that are kind of a neo-Nazi ilk. So I think it really heralded this militant religiosity around the world. And it also ends up being a kind of a self-help book for aspiring dictators and foreign service officers whose alternative title could have been get your head out of your ass it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a parable about the dangers of getting too deep into a rut in in in kind of any walk of life because your various casts of protagonists had only the vaguest understanding of what was happening around them it was astonishing that that's it's absolutely incredible the

americans who and again this was probably the most important on the alliance the Americans had between Western Europe and Japan. Iran, the Shah was buying half of all American foreign arms sales. Fifth largest army in the world. 50,000 Americans were working in Iran, and yet they had absolutely no conception of what was happening under the surface there. At the behest of the Shah, the Shah hated foreign, you know, embassy people to interview even the most mild

opposition to as a rule. So the Americans just never, never bothered to do it. The CIA did no domestic, not even surveillance, just like investigation within Iran. And the other thing, in the American standpoint, is that very few people, nobody in the CIA and very few people at the embassy spoke Farsi. So they were reliant on the talking heads around them that were pro-Shah. And meanwhile, the Shah, in kind of the Michael Jackson syndrome, had surrounded himself with synchaffance. So he was in this echo chamber. And I mean, I think it's a great metaphor that very few times he would leave the palace, which was up on a hill above Tehran, it was always by helicopter. Because the traffic had gotten so bad in Tehran, his motorcade couldn't get through.

So he chapered everywhere. And that's just such a symbol of what his rule had become. You spend a couple pages early on describing an important meeting between the Shah and his key advisor, Asadullah Alam, in which you emphasize the extraordinarily rigid formality of the whole thing. So that Alam takes care never to turn his back on the Shah as he navigates the long entry into the office and he addresses him informal. language and so on even though he's spending a you know some large fraction of his time procuring uh women for for his and the shah's amusement there the shah had no closer friend and yet this guy alam couldn't be frank with him really that's right and when he and when he would walk into the shah's office he was as you as you point out they were they were partners in crime

when it came to women, his closest friend, one of the only people who would stand up to the Shah occasionally and couched in such a language that the Shah would accept. But when he would walk in, they met virtually every day for anywhere from a half hour to five or six hours and traveled together constantly. The Shah would hold out his hand to be kissed by Asadola Alam, bulleted across the desk.

And Alam would take the hand. He would kiss it and kind of give a prayer, this kind of ritualized prayer for the, the continued health and safety of the light of the arians, the shadow of God on earth, the King of Kings. It's phenomenal. It's really something out of like the 17th century. And yet Iran is experiencing extraordinary upheavals. The Shah is a kind of an ambiguous character, I think right through. I suspect in your head even today. Genius or fool. Extraordinarily. Dillardly.

student of the economy, of strategy, and especially of sort of military equipment, but also completely unaware of what's going on around him. But he does play Iran's shaky hand quite well through sort of the first half of his reign, to the point where, as our story begins in the early 70s, Iran is a major regional player. How did you do that? The Shah's, you're right, he's one of the most bewildering figures I've ever, I think the most bewildering figure I've ever encountered in history. Just a bundle of contradictions, brilliant.

Even his, you know, enemies would say he was brilliant. And yet utterly blind in other ways to what was happening around him. He engineered more than any other single person the quadrupling of oil prices after the Arab oil embargo in 1973, and all of a sudden, Iran was just, money was just flowing in. I mean, the quadrupling of oil prices in 1974 represented the biggest transfer of wealth and human history from the West to the middle, to the oil-producing countries. Other countries were smarter about not flooding their economy so much money right away. the shaw wouldn't listen to his economic advisors all the money was poured into the right away into building up his

military to building up the infrastructure of the country and it overheated the economy and triggered a recession and that recession started about about a year and a half before the revolution but there had been this amazing kind of oil rush oil boom and then it had fallen off the other side and so a lot of people, you know, figure, I mean, it wasn't a depression, but it was a recession. And a lot of people figured that was a key factor in the revolution. I'm just thinking that the, some of the lessons that I learned as a, as an inconstant student of world history from the book, extend well outside the Middle East. Like, so the, the, the world is in, uh, constant surplus of oil, which is not a particularly valuable commodity through the 30 years after the Second World War.

It drives the Western recovery from the war until OPEC gets its act together in the 70s, starts to tighten the taps. And then all of that progress of wealth ends in North America, Europe. And suddenly the OPEC producing nations are on this freight elevator of massive inflow of income and so on. But it's an elevator that not everyone can get on. And so it aggravates urban rural divides. It aggravates the Iran that the Shah can see from the Iran that he can't see that starts to get its own ideas. That's right. incidentally, I was actually traveling with my father through Iran in 1975, so it was right in the days of the gold rush.

And you really saw, it was two very different societies in one country. In Tehran, this huge boom, construction going on everywhere, women in miniskirts, and 15 miles outside of Tehran, people were living in mud huts. and for fuel, they were using dry cow dump. So it was this massive chasm in society. And also at the time, there was a 7 to 1 ratio of wealth, urban to rural. So it was really vast. And what was happening, the countryside had always been much more conservative, much more religious. And during the gold rush in Iran, millions of young men left the countryside and moved to the cities,

hoping to catch their own little piece of the gold rush. And then when everything sort of stopped, now you have these massive shanty towns on the edge of every Iranian city, full of young men who have just been disenfranchised scraping by an existence, and very religious. And so that was kind of the powder keg that kind of blew up.

You were primed to tell this story in a couple different ways. One was that early trip through Iran and another was a kind of an eventful afternoon in Washington. Only a few years later. Tell me about that day. That's right. So, and it's, interestingly, a lot of people associate this day with the actual beginning of the revolution.

November 15th, 1977, the Shah was, came to Washington to have his first meeting with Jimmy Carter, president. And some 4,000 anti-Shah demonstrators, mostly leftist. Iranian exchange students living in the United States or Canada, gathering in Washington to protest his visit. They caught wind that this was going to happen, the Iranian regime, so they bust in all these military cadets that were undergoing training on American military basis. And so just as the Shah arrived at the White House,

there was this mass riot on the ellipse, which is this big great lawn just south of the White House. And I happened to, I was an 18-year-old kid, and I was working next door at the Treasury Department, the headquarters. And I was the special aid to the Secretary of Treasury, basically as Aaron Boy. And so I had just wandered over, and I was actually in the kind of no-man's land between these two sides, the pro and the anti-Shaw demonstrators. When the no-man's land disappeared, they both charged each other, and I was caught in the middle of it. And I make the point, I got knocked to the ground. somebody hit me in the back with a club.

And it was so hard that I don't know who hit me, but I figured it was one of the cadets over some leftist graduate student because he had some power behind. They were good at it, so they had to be, yeah, okay. So that's the sort of thing you would marvel at on the day and follow the headlines for a few days after, but basically tuck away until much later.

Right. The significance of it would come to you, you know, much later in your life well actually not that much longer because within really within about two months after the that visit uh the iranian revolution started and and i think what what's very important about that day uh november 15th is it was being shown live in iran his arrival this triumphant visit of the shah to the you know to the american president but the way most Iranians interpreted it was, oh, the Americans are humiliating the Shah. Like, why would they let this happen in the nation's capital? So it was actually interpreted as like, oh, the Americans are kind of

trying to cut him loose. And that's really fed into this idea that the Shah had fallen out of favor with the United States and that he was in a weakened state. And very quickly after is when you started seeing demonstrations inside Iran for the first time in a decade now this is we have the luxury of knowing how the story ends this is the crisis that ends jimmy carter's presidency surely he kept an eagle eye on it from the outset knowing the dangers he said naively one one would think no you know um it's it's ironic you know what people forget about jimmy carter was He probably had the most ambitious foreign policy initiatives of any present in my lifetime. The Panama Canal negotiations, Salt 2, the recognition of China, full recognition,

Arab-Israeli peace talks. And by bizarre coincidence, every time there was a major miles, a major crisis point in the Iranian revolution, Carter was otherwise occupied with something that seemed even more important. important at the moment. There was a massacre in Tehran where over 100 people were killed by it was called Black Friday. It demonstrates were killed by soldiers and people were begging Carter to get in touch with the Shah to reassure him. He was at Camp David with Monachin Began and Amar Sadat. So he gets on the phone and he talks to the Shah for a total of six or seven minutes. And again and again it was this other things were going

on. The other thing is that he was very well, he was very ill-served by the news coming out of the American embassy in Tehran. There were very few people who were saying, you know, this place is in trouble. The narrative almost right up to the end was the Shah's got this under control. Everything's to be fine. This is a little blip. But, you know, certainly his drone is not in danger. up to the point where the Shah was saying, I'm sorry, Carter was saying even three weeks before the Shah went into exile, you know, everything is under control. Obviously, you know, we have full faith in the Shah. One of the built-in ironies of this is that because the Iranian people saw the Shah as the American Shah, the more the administration came out and voiced their support for him, the more it fueled this, this, this, this idea of the shaw being this this american lackey some of the most interesting things

structurally in the book some of the most interesting um human stories in the book i suspect are a product of the opening conundrum that faces every author which is how the hell am i going to tell this story uh the most of the major figures are dead um if i'm not mistaken you don't speak farce and and you needed some some some story So you introduce a sort of series of figures just outside the periphery who end up playing key roles. Right. And on this story of really how much the Americans were flying blind, I was struck by the story of Henry Precht, who's a political military officer in the sort of the liaison between the State Department and the Iranian government early on.

And on his way in, he asks around and says, what do we have on Iran now that I'm going to go working there? And he gets kind of a surprising series of answers. That's right. He meets with the director of the Iran desk at the State Department. And there's this whole, usually an orientation when you're about to be being sent to another country, it's this orientation last two to three weeks. I think prex lasted two or three days.

And basically, he was going as the military liaison, what they call the political military officer, to be with the Iranian military. And he said, well, shouldn't I, you know, shouldn't I take Farsi lessons? And the Iran director said, no need. Everyone you're going to be talking to speaks English. And that preck said, well, you know, what has been written? Are there any books I should read? And the director goes, no, nothing. So he just walks into this, really just completely blind.

And that was representative of just what happened again and again and again with Iran. And people who did say that there were problems were actively discouraged. I talked about one character, he was started out as a Peace Corps volunteer and he became then became a foreign service officer in Iran, a guy who spoke. Farsi, a man named Michael Matrinko. And he, because he spoke Farsi, and he was kind of a gregarious guy, he developed a big circle, you know, social circle in Iran, he realized there was all this stuff going on under the surface.

And not only was he ignored by his superiors in the embassy, he was reprimanded. He was, at one point, twice, actually, he was threatened with being thrown out of the Foreign Service if he kept this, you know, this hysterious, supposedly about, you know, forces working against the Shah. Yeah. This is the guy who is talking to an art collector about why this art collector is suddenly all hot to trot to get a visa to get out of Iran. He says, why on earth would you like, I mean, the Shaw's wife is big on art.

Why on earth would you want to leave? And the guy says, well, this place is about to blow up. That's right. And when he reports that up the chain, he gets in trouble. That's right. So this is, this is 1977. This is about four, it was March of 1977. So about, you know, before the Shah has even come to Washington and stuff. But Matronko, he is assigned to the visa office. And because he speaks far, so he's talking to people. And he very quickly realizes people are taking their money out of the country and putting it abroad. And this art collector, it has this priceless art collection of Persian art. And he's trying to send it out. And as you said, he says, he says, this place is about to blow up. The line for visas to get out of Iran in early 1977 went down for two blocks.

People were spending the night out to get in line in the morning. And the great thing that Matronko told me was that CIA officers were coming to him, because there was such a backlog, CIA officers were coming to him with the passports of their best assets. the people of the field, and saying, hey, can you, you know, will you put this visa on the top of the pile? And Matrico said, you know, hey, Mr. Intelligence Officer, what, you know, what does it tell you when your best sources are trying to get the hell out of the country, you know, and they didn't put it together, the CIA. So, I'm not sure whether it was him or someone else who catches

wind of an incipient revolt in the Air Force. And it was him. Yeah. It was him. And Air Force officers are trying to discourage their sort of enlisted men from flying into revolt against the Ayatollah and then finally decide, no, you guys are right, we're going to join your little revolt. And again, the fact check on this astonishing claim that the Iranian Air Force is turning against the Shah, the fact check is fairly cursory. Right, right, that's right. And the Air Force was the Shah's darling. He was a pilot himself. So the Iranian Air Force got everything it wanted from the Shah,

you know, absolutely the top of the heat. So Matronko, he was based in the city of Tabriz, which is a northwestern around a provincial city, a huge air base there because you're very close to the Turkish and Soviet border. And he catches wind that all these pilots have shown up and to resign. And the base commander convinces him, don't resign, just stay where you are now. And when the critical day of revolution comes, we'll switch sides to the, we'll switch sides to Khomeini. He, Matronko relays this to Washington at, you know, this is a top secret thing.

So it goes by what they call a one-time pad, you know, the most top secret way of coding and communication. So it goes to the ambassador. The ambassador is sitting around playing poker at the embassy. And he tells the head military liaison. There's a small group of American military advisors also living on the military base in Tabriz. He says, call your guys up and find out what the story is with this mutiny. So the general, the American general, calls this bar on the base where all the American military advisors are hanging out.

And they say, yeah, don't see anything happening here. And that's the end of it. And then Matronko gets called to DeBries. And that's the second time he was threatened with being thrown out of the foreign service. Because it's like, you know, and then, of course, the irony is after the revolution in the revolution, the Air Force did switch sides. And that base commander in Tabriz became the first minister of defense in the revolutionary government. So again, Matronko was right. One other story that made my eyes kind of pop out of my head, even though it's been previously reported, is

Ayatolli communities in France. He's got a sort of a small corporal's guard around him to act as his enablers and propagandists. And one of these guys is Sadeg Goptzadei, who ends up in a torrid relationship. relationship with a Radio-Canada reporter named Carol Jerome. That's, you are, you are kind not to spend more than a page or two on this, because as a Canadian reading this, I was just absolutely astonished. Yeah. I can't think of a more blatant case of coloring outside the lines for a reporter to take up with an Iranian revolutionary.

That's right. And again, she's kind of representative, because she's, you know, starry-eyed because of her relationship with Hopsidae. And he was feeding her this kind of, this image of Khomeini as this, you know, moderate, you know, democracy-loving cleric. And this was kind of going on. There were about three men. They were a ride around Khomeini, all Western educated,

certainly much more moderate. They were Islamists, but much more moderate than Khomeini turned out to be. But when Khomeini got to Paris and the early, October of 78, about two and a half months before the revolution succeeded, all of a sudden, all the Western media was, you know, at his doorstep. And so people like Hopsa Day and man I profile in the book, Ibrahimiyazdi, they acted as interpreters, translators for Khomeini. Because, of course, none of the Western journalists spoke Farsi either. And there's these amazing stories of how, you know, at one point a journalist asks Homanie, well, if the

Shah doesn't step down soon, what, you know, what will you do? And Homeni said, I will call for rivers of blood to flow. And how that was translated back to these journalists was, well, he'll be very upset. Rivers of blood was not translated. And remarkably, the other thing is, So people didn't look at what Homania had written before. And it really underscores to me how much communication has changed. And really, communication of 1978 had more in common with communications of 200 years before than it does now. That Homanie's writings, Homanie's sermons from 25, 30 years before, which were really extremist, very anti-Semitic, very anti-West,

but just really kind of a medieval notion of Islam, nobody had read them, certainly nobody in the West. So they had no idea of what this guy was really about. And I use this example of like anyone today with a laptop and a good search engine could find out more about Khomeini in two hours than all the Western intelligence agencies could have done in a month. And so part of that was self-fulfilling because none of them spoke the language. But the flow of information was so much more rudimentary, even just 45 years ago.

I mean, at its best, that environment produced a situation where sort of anyone with an idea and a little gumption could make it happen because nobody was filling forms out in triplicate. At its worst, it turned the Middle East into a center of turmoil and revolution for a generation. And so six of one, half a dozen to the other, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the other, you know, the irony of, it's something that I had not really fully comprehended. But, you know, in 1978, Americans were still in the Cold War. And Carter, despite being a progressive, and, you know, he, they saw everything through

the prism of the Cold War and that this kind of zero-sum game where if we lose, then the Soviets automatically win and vice versa. So for a very long time, when the Shah looked to be in trouble, the biggest fear was that Iran would go red. In fact, the Communist Party in Iran was embryonic. There was never a leftist threat. And the Soviets had no involvement in the revolution at all. But then was so when Khomeini comes along, and he's this virulently anti-communist, arch-conservative, this idea starts setting, in the Carter administration of like, okay, well, obviously the best thing would be if the shot survives. But if this religious cleric takes over, that's not the worst thing either, because the worst thing would be communist. And so, you know, and then the great irony is

that, as you said, 45 years later, we're still dealing with this right wing cleric taking over, where if it had gone communist, 10 years later, everything fell apart in the communist world so you know it would that problem would be over yeah now the shaw had dealings with every president uh from fDR to jimmy carter and you sketch those relations often troubled often essentially condescending because the shaw was at the outside a very young man uh with a very tenuous grasp on a throne whose value was not obvious to american presidents uh and and Then, by the time he gets to Richard Nixon, he absolutely hits the jackpot in a way that astonished the two presidents who followed Nixon. What did he get from Nixon?

So, yes. So the Shaw ever since coming to power in 1941, his father was deposed, was forced to abdicate by the British and the Russians. See, he was a 21-year-old, and seen as very kind of callow and weak. and he was always trying for decades he was trying to win over the Americans to become sort of an important ally of the Americans as a way to to at the time the British Empire was still in the region is to to kind of reduce the local power of both the Soviets and the British and so that the Americans were with his third force but he had nothing to offer Americans were washing oil they didn't need oil and they also didn't want to open up another front in the cold war. So the Shah wanted to build up this army. Americans had no interest in it. It all began to change in the 1960s. Now America was no longer an exporter of oil. It was starting to import. And also the American military machine had been really set back by the Vietnam War. So what Nixon and Kissinger did, it was called the Nixon Doctrine, where they appointed regional powers to be,

the kind of American policemen of the region. So in the Middle East, it was Saudi Arabia and Iran. And there was this pivotal meeting in Tehran, where Nixon-Kissinger came. They met with the Shah, and they said, from now on, he's always been buying weapons, trying to buy weapons from the Americans. He had to go through congressional approval, all this. And so they said, from now on, you don't need congressional approval. you don't need to you can buy anything you want short of nuclear weapons and no questions asked you have a blank check

and this was just i mean this was imman it from heaven for the shaw and this started this this insane arms binge that he did where virtually all the money coming into the country was going to build up this this massive military it is a key point that the iran military was bigger and and certainly stronger than all the militaries of the air world combined. So if he wants to buy a radar system or, you know, a new tank or something like that, he doesn't, there's not going to be, he's not going to have Congress on his back, he's not going to have. And so one of the unintended consequences of this is that he becomes the meal ticket for every American general and admiral who wants some new kit in their arsenal. Because if they can get the Shaw interested, then this stuff gets built and the price goes down because he's sharing the cost.

And so suddenly every general and admiral in the American forces is beating a path to Tehran to hitch their wagon to the Shah. Yeah, I mean, in a lot with every defense contractor and defense company. But yes, generals and admirals. And there's a great. So actually, you were mentioning Henry Preck earlier. At this time, he was still the military liaison in Iran. And an admiral is, well, they finally got so unseemly with these generals and admirals showing up. that the embassy said no active serving military can have an audience with the shaw and try to

peddle him with weapons and so an admiral shows up in town american admiral and he's as an audience with the with the shaw and correct and the ambassador before he goes to the meeting take him aside and go you understand you're not you're not to try to you know sell the the shaw on this weapon system and he said well that then the general and the admiral goes well you know that might be the state department's position but that's not the pentagon's you know position uh i'm i'm here to sell the shaw ships and so and he goes and you know and the shaw these were like toys to the shaw you know he did he just loved this stuff he would read like uh equipment catalogs uh to to waft himself off to sleep at night that's right that's right it's extraordinary but then all these

reports of how defense contractors would show up and have an audience with them. And the Sean knew the specifications of the weapon system they were trying to sell better than their reps did. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of defense material. But this sort of free hall pass from Nixon and Kissinger badly disincentivizes everybody in Washington against perceiving the possibility that the Shah could be in trouble. Because of the Shah's in trouble, they're all in trouble. And so they don't want to hear it. That's right. They don't want to hear it. You know, it sounds a bit kind of flippant to say. But I really think that one of the key reasons the Americans didn't realize the Shah was in such trouble was because they just didn't want to see it. They,

they were the whole, he was so important to the Americans that they couldn't conceive of losing him so they just didn't conceive of it and um they you know kind of this willful blindness to what was happening and of course once you know in diplomacy once you establish a precedent like nixon kissinger did with a blank check for weapons it's very hard for another president come along uh and rescind it without rupturing the the alliance so that became you know set in place but yes you so you had 50 000 of americans working in iran almost all involved in defense-related industries. You had 50,000 Iranian students going to university in the United States.

They were buying half of all American arms sales abroad. So the interconnectedness made it to a point where you couldn't conceive of losing this. It would be like losing Japan or Great Britain. And so the whole apparatus of government became involved around not seeing the problem. And so a guy like Mike Matronko comes along and he says, hey, we've got problems. They shut him out.

Another lesson, I mean, because the Middle East isn't my field of specialization, to say the least, I kept finding ways to apply this to everything else that governments do. And another lesson from this book is that almost every large decision, is going to have terrible second-order consequences and all the more so if you just assume that it won't. That's right. It had better work out fine, so I'm sure it'll work out fine.

It's probably a bad philosophy. That's right. That's right. Through all of this is another one of your star characters, which is Farah Pahlavi, the Shah's wife, who is still alive today and whom you interviewed for the book. and seems quite a formidable presence even now. Yes, she's a remarkable woman.

She's 86. She divides her time between Washington and Paris. When I met her, I had a long, long interview with her. She all made up wearing a very attractive pantsuit with wearing three-inch heels and kind of teetering on her feet a bit, which made her, like, valet, very, very nervous. that he's a pitch over. She had a charisma about her that the Sean never had. And she had a knowledge of the street, a knowledge, a lot of people really adored her.

She would go into rural villages and peasants. I don't know if we can still use that word peasants, but they would shower her with flowers. They would ask her to bless their babies. and she really had and she really was very very charismatic and very progressive and the clerics hated her because she would she would deliberately do this thing of you know manly things of going to a construction site and wearing a hard hat not you know a shawl voting and and so they hated her almost as much as they hated the shaw but she started to see things going south probably about three years before the revolution and she repeatedly tried to warn her husband and I

remember at one point she she took him inside and I think she said I think the people are getting tired of us and he just didn't want to hear it and he refused to hear it and certainly all through the revolution she she knew time was running out at a time when he still thought he was just kind of paralyzed she she ends up being a kind of a Cassandra figure She's got a better sense than the guys do, that things are going wrong, but very limited ability to influence events. That's right. She also inspires from Jimmy Carter some of the stupidest public statements any statesman

ever made. He just couldn't stop running off at the mouth about what a looker she was. I know. I know. It's weird. You realize how much has changed in that. I don't even think, well, maybe Donald Trump does that shoe, but yeah, yeah, he would, And she was educated, she went to a school of architecture in Paris.

And she was a very smart, very accomplished woman. And yeah, during these state visits with Carter, he, yeah, he just constantly talked about how beautiful she was. And it pissed her off. She seized at that. Yeah, I mean, like I hesitate to think what Mrs. Carter thought of all of this. But Farah Palavi was not. impressed no you don't play this up at in great detail but as the story

begins Israel and Iran are more allies than enemies and they they also sort of watch helpless as the neighbors turn into something they grew to fear and despise. That's right. And so the interesting thing, even though Khomeini was a raging anti-Semite, the Iranian Jews have never been expelled where they were, you know, after the 67 war, they were expelled from almost every Arab. Well, Iran is not Arab, but maybe Muslim country, they're expelled. They were never expelled. There's still today. There's quite a large Iranian Jewish community. And there was always, yes, there was always, ties between between uh israel and the shah uh not at the full level of of ambassador he's he had to

keep it somewhat on the on the down low um but we you know during the arab oil embargo when of course you know the arabs were not selling any oil to israel but the shah was um so yes they always had kind of close close relations which you know again is quite ironic today of the recent uh israeli and american attacks on uh iran's nuclear capability um i think a lot of people are still puzzling over what to make of it and and and and how successful that was right so i've i've maintained a kind of a discrete communication lines with a number of iranians inside iran most of almost all of them of would consider themselves of the opposition to the regime to some degree.

I've talked with a lot of them since the Israeli-American bombing, and virtually all of them are completely despondent. They feel it's set back the opposition movement for years. So whatever physical damage was done to the country or to the nuclear program, now the regime can, there's been this tremendous rallying around the flag, which usually happens when you know it's a general rule people around the world don't like being bombed by foreign foreign armies and so there's been this tremendous rallying around the flag

with the clerics and now the now the regime can paint the opposition as lackeys of the Israelis and the americans so there's this odd moment where certainly iran's regional proxies They've been devastated, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown. So that is all in a shambles. But the feeling of Iranians I've talked to is that internally, the regime is stronger than ever. And certainly they feel that the bombings gave the regime a new lease on life when things were really quite bad before. The economy is in ruins. But yeah.

So among the opposition, they're quite grim about the bombings. Now, this is your ninth book. You've written novels and nonfiction, which is harder? You know, I think novels. I think novels, because it's a great question. With novels, you have to kind of create and inhabit. different world. And what I found when I wrote novels is that if I left it, you leave that world at your own peril. And it always takes a while to come back to it. So I was always, when I was

writing novels, I was also doing journalism. So if I went off for a month to do a magazine piece and then came back, it was always difficult to get back to that place. Where with nonfiction, you have the external guideposts. So I find if I have to leave it for whatever reason, I can kind of get back into it quite quickly. What the challenge for me for non-fiction, I've always thought of myself more as a storyteller than, and my journalism is almost always kind of built around,

say, a village or a family in a war zone. So for me, it's always been what's the story? I'm not a historian. But it's like finding people or finding situations that create a narrative that people outside can relate to. And that's true with my journalism and also true with my nonfiction books. And you mentioned the real challenge of this book of King of Kings was coming up with that narrative form. And it kind of what light bulb went off in my head. It's like each of the three protagonists, Khomeini, the Shah and Carter, had these very small groups of

of people they were listening to or people who were observing what was happening around each, all three of them. And so to kind of tell the story from those kind of secondary, the people who were like the flies on the wall, I felt was the way to do it.

But neither room is easy. Neither fiction or nonfiction. And it's lonely. Obviously they have to sit in a room by yourself for months or years. I have to ask, in a long career as a foreign correspondent, still in the rapids of the profession at the New York Times with real budgets

and an engaged audience, do you notice that you have less and less company around you? Oh, gosh, yes. Gosh, yes. Yeah. I mean, I've never been, you know, if something happens, because of the way I write, and as I mentioned, I'm always kind of looking at a human interest level. I don't have to be on the front lines of a war zone. So I'm usually not part of the rat pack that you see when something is going on, but vastly fewer people now are being sent out. And where I really see it is with photojournalists. I work with an incredible Italian photojournalists, but I would say probably the number of photojournalists who can make a living from just doing photography now for journalism you can probably kind of on two hands throughout the world um it's just

very very limited and and they have to take more and more of the risk and upfront expense on themselves in hopes of hooking a high profile client uh once they've got the photos uh to to show for it which is a very tenuous existence that's right and war zones are usually expensive right just to to get around, I mean, to find a fixer, to find a driver, they're expensive. And, you know, I know that, I don't know what the New York Times pays photojournalist today, but it was $400 a day on a contract, which you could ease, I remember being in southern Lebanon during the Israeli incursion in, what was it, 2008. And you were spending more than $400 a day just standing still, you know,

And a lot of the people there did not have contracts. And it was a lost leader for them and for thousands of dollars. I imagine the day rate has gone up a little bit, but not much. Yeah. Well, we will always have a lot to talk about when the subject is the Middle East. But I think we've covered a lot of ground today. Scott Anderson, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having it, Paul. you and the book is king of kings that's the Paul well show for this week thanks to Kevin Bright for writing the theme music and Andy Milne for playing it on piano if you like the Paul Wells show tell your friends I hope you're having a great summer