Word: shahs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Persian Nights shows why. Author Diane Johnson's sixth novel transports a handful of Americans into Iran during the summer of 1978. These remarkably ordinary visitors have no way of knowing they have jetted into a maelstrom, a seething revolution that will soon topple the Shah, rearrange the balances of power and terror in the Middle East and seriously frazzle two successive American presidencies. But in hindsight from 1987, when all of this is known, anyone who was in Iran then, even only in make-believe, can be made to seem interesting...
From the archives the commission exhumed the stories of Truman's defense budget, Ike's U-2 crisis, Kennedy's Operation Mongoose (the plot against Castro), Carter's treatment of the Shah and many other shadowy maneuvers from the past...
With halting steps, the pallid but ever fierce Iranian leader Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 86, last week stepped out of his long seclusion. He appeared at the Jamaran mosque outside Tehran, where he made a speech to mark the eighth anniversary of the Shah's overthrow...
This story is supported by Mansur Rafizadeh, a former high official in SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. Long a double agent serving both SAVAK and the CIA, Rafizadeh worked solely for the CIA after the Shah fell from power in 1979. According to Rafizadeh, Ghorbanifar first came to the CIA's attention in late 1980 when the Carter Administration was desperate to win the release of U.S. hostages from the seized American embassy in Tehran. George Cave, a retired CIA agent then working under a contract with the agency, asked Rafizadeh if Ghorbanifar could help. The former SAVAK agent...
Such women served Khashoggi's purposes in other ways. In the 1970s Khashoggi spent much time and money recruiting the "escorts" hired by the Shah, in order to get information about the Iranian's military plans. "The Shah was timid with women," Khashoggi says, "and liked to impress them by telling them exciting secrets." Khashoggi himself coached the women on how to guide the conversation to areas of particular interest. "They always came back with valuable intelligence," he says with a smile...