The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran by Dan Kovalik

Author:Dan Kovalik
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Iran, Propaganda, United States, Politics, War, Espionage, History
ISBN: 9781510739352
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-05-08T14:00:00+00:00

7

THE SHAH’S REIGN BEGINS TO CRUMBLE

If you watch the movie Argo, you will see the quite amusing scene of young people in the former US Embassy pasting together the confidential and secret documents which the Embassy staff had feverishly shredded before the hostage-taking in 1980. This amazing puzzle-like project did take place, and, over many years, the documents were put back together.

As journalist Robert Fisk explains:

A team of twenty students was gathered to work on the papers. A flat board was fitted with elastic bands to hold the shreds in place. They could reconstruct five to ten documents a week. They were the carpetweavers, carefully, almost lovingly re-threading their tapestry. Iranian carpets are filled with flowers and birds, the recreation of a garden in the desert; they were intended to give life amid sand and heat, to create eternal meadows amid a wasteland. The Iranians who worked for months on those shredded papers were creating their own unique carpet, one that exposed the past and was transformed into a living history book amid the arid propaganda of the revolution. High-school students and disabled war veterans were enlisted to work on this carpet of papers. It would take them six years to complete, 3,000 pages containing 2,300 documents, all eventually contained in 85 volumes.¹

The documents painstakingly put back together by the Iranians, known as the “Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den,” are now online and make for fascinating reading.² They detail the final years of the Shah and the support the United States would give him until the very end. Unless otherwise noted, I cite those documents here in a short history of the fall of the last Shah of Iran.

The last few years of the Shah were marked by huge protests and equally massive repression in response. As a December 5, 1978, State Department cable I discovered on WikiLeaks related:

DOMONSTRATIONS (sic.): ACCORDING TO JAFFARI, NIGHT OF DEC 2 WAS PARTICULARLY VIOLENT IN BAZAAR AREA. TROOPS KILLED SOME 300 DEMONSTRATORS. JAFFARI CLAIMED TO HAVE SEEN THE SHOOTING AND THE BODIES LITTERING SAR CHESHMEH STREET. DURING CLEANUP THE SHOES LEFT LYING IN THE STREET FILLED TWO LARGE GUNNY³

Robert Fisk describes a demonstration with much greater numbers of casualties. As he explains, “Street marches in Tehran were more than a million strong. Revolutionary literature still claims that the Shah’s army killed 4,000 demonstrators in Jaleh Square in Tehran on 8 September,” 1978.⁴

Imagine: Four thousand people killed in one demonstration! If such a thing happened in Venezuela or Cuba, or in Iran in 2018, this would be cause for the United States to send in the 82nd Airborne. In addition, such an event would be cause for great media fanfare if it happened, say, in China, for example, during the Tiananmen Square protests ten years later in which three hundred to three thousand protestors were killed.

The Tiananmen Square protests and massacre live in infamy, and in the collective consciousness, while the Jaleh Square massacre in Tehran is forgotten in the West, if it was ever known about to begin with.

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