The U.S. blunders that led to the Iranian Revolution

Scott Anderson on his history of Iran’s move toward theocracy.

- BY MARC WEINGARTEN

NANETTE BURSTEIN

For over 40 years, Scott Anderson has been one of America’s most incisive foreign correspondents, filing dispatches from trouble spots around the world with a novelist’s eye and a talent for disentangling complex issues.

The author of seven previous books, Anderson’s latest is “King of Kings,” an immersive history of the events that led to the 1979 downfall of the shah of Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theocratic republic.

Anderson traces the roots of the Iranian Revolution to the U.S. government’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. A creeping codependency between the U.S. and Iran followed, abetted by massive military and oil contracts, at the same time that U.S. representatives in Iran turned a blind eye to the shah’s abuses of power and, later, Khomeini’s anti-Western jihadism.

I spoke with Anderson about his book and the missteps that led to the occupation of the United States Embassy by Khomeini’s followers on Nov. 4, 1979.