Section IV: The Overthrow of 1979

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not a sudden eruption. It was the culmination of fifteen years of patient subversion by a cleric in exile, the catastrophic miscalculation of a sick king, and a global audience that mistook a totalitarian theocrat for a liberation hero. To understand the regime that menaces the United States today, one must understand how it came to power — not by popular mandate, but by hijacking a popular uprising and never giving the country back.

Khomeini's Long War on the Pahlavi State

By the early 1960s, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was attempting to modernize Iran through what he called the "White Revolution" — a top-down reform program that included land redistribution from feudal landlords and the Shia clerical establishment, women's suffrage, profit-sharing for industrial workers, and a national literacy corps (Britannica, n.d.-a). The reforms threatened two power centers simultaneously: the landed clergy, whose endowments (waqf) and tithes underwrote their authority, and the bazaari merchant class, whose traditional economic networks were being disrupted (Abrahamian, 2008).

Ruhollah Khomeini, then a relatively obscure mid-ranking ayatollah in the seminary city of Qom, emerged as the most uncompromising clerical voice against the program. In June 1963, following a denunciatory sermon against the Shah, Khomeini was arrested. Riots followed, were crushed by the army, and Khomeini was released only to be re-arrested in November 1964 after he denounced a "capitulations" law granting U.S. military advisors immunity from Iranian prosecution. He was forced into exile, first to Bursa, Turkey, then in October 1965 to the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq, where he would spend more than thirteen years building his network (Khomeini's life in exile, Wikipedia, n.d.).

In Najaf, Khomeini did three things that the Shah's intelligence service, SAVAK, failed to neutralize. First, he developed and refined the doctrine that would become the constitutional foundation of the Islamic Republic — Velayat-e Faqih, the "Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist" — articulated in a series of lectures in 1970 arguing that in the absence of the Hidden Imam, supreme political authority must rest with a senior cleric. Second, he trained a generation of younger clerics who would later staff the revolutionary apparatus, including Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei. Third, he weaponized a new technology that the Shah's censors had no answer for: the audio cassette tape.

The Cassette-Tape Insurgency

From a rented house in Najaf and later, after Saddam Hussein expelled him on October 5, 1978, from a modest villa in Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, Khomeini recorded sermons that were duplicated on standard consumer cassette tapes and smuggled into Iran by pilgrims, merchants, and a clandestine clerical network (JSTOR Daily, n.d.). The tapes circumvented every state-controlled medium — radio, television, newspapers, and the censors. They were played in mosques, bazaars, taxis, and homes. They were the world's first viral political content: cheap, copyable, untraceable, and emotionally devastating. By 1978, recordings of Khomeini's denunciations of the Shah were saturating Iran while the cleric himself remained safely abroad — visible enough to inspire, invisible enough to be untouchable (WION News, n.d.).

The Shah's reciprocal communication strategy was print propaganda in state-controlled newspapers. He lost the information war before he understood it had begun.

1977-1978: The Streets Rise

By early 1978, the cassette-fueled agitation produced street violence. On January 7, 1978, the regime planted a hit piece in the newspaper Ettela'at attacking Khomeini's character and accusing him of being a foreign agent. Two days later, seminary students in Qom protested and were fired upon by police; the deaths produced the traditional Shia 40-day mourning cycle (arba'een), which mechanically generated a new protest 40 days later in Tabriz, which produced new deaths and the next 40-day cycle in cities across Iran. Each cycle gathered momentum (Abrahamian, 2008).

By August 1978, demonstrations were nationwide. On August 19, 1978, a fire at the Cinema Rex in Abadan killed approximately 470 people; the regime and the opposition each blamed the other, but the public overwhelmingly blamed the Shah and SAVAK, accelerating the protests.

Black Friday — September 8, 1978

On September 7, 1978, the Shah declared martial law in Tehran and eleven other cities. On the morning of September 8 — a date that would become known as Black Friday (Jom'eh-ye Siah) — thousands gathered in Tehran's Jaleh Square, many reportedly unaware of the martial-law decree. The Imperial Army opened fire. The official figures recorded approximately 64 killed and 205 wounded; opposition propaganda inflated the toll into the thousands, and the higher figure was widely accepted abroad (Black Friday, 1978, Wikipedia, n.d.; Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2025).

Whichever figure is accurate, the political effect was identical. Black Friday eliminated any possibility of compromise. From that day forward, the revolution was a question of when, not whether.

The Shah Flees, Khomeini Returns, the Republic Is Voted

On January 16, 1979, terminally ill with lymphoma and abandoned by his own intelligence service, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi departed Iran for Egypt. He never returned. On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini flew from Paris to Tehran aboard a chartered Air France Boeing 747, accompanied by approximately 120 Western journalists whose access — granted by Khomeini — provided the cleric with a global media platform on the day he arrived. Asked by an ABC News correspondent en route what he felt about returning to Iran after fourteen years, Khomeini answered: Hichi — "Nothing" (Iranian Revolution, Wikipedia, n.d.). It was the first signal that the man Western press had cast as a Gandhi-like spiritual liberator was something colder.

On February 11, 1979, the Iranian military command declared neutrality in the political contest, withdrawing support from the post-Shah government of Shapour Bakhtiar. The revolution was complete. Within weeks, the executions began — first of generals and SAVAK officers, then of monarchists, then of leftists who had marched alongside the clerics, then of insufficiently revolutionary clerics themselves.

On March 30 and 31, 1979, Khomeini conducted a national referendum with a single question on the ballot: "Should the monarchy be replaced by an Islamic Republic — yes or no?" No alternative form of government was offered. Official results recorded 98.2 percent in favor on a reported 20.4 million votes (1979 Iranian Islamic Republic referendum, Wikipedia, n.d.; Grokipedia, n.d.).

On December 2 and 3, 1979, a second referendum ratified the new Constitution — the document that institutionalized Velayat-e Faqih, established the Supreme Leader as the highest authority in the state (above the elected president), and created the Council of Guardians as a clerical veto over the legislature. Official results reported 99.5 percent approval (1979 Iranian constitutional referendum, Wikipedia, n.d.). The framework Khomeini had sketched in his Najaf lectures was now law.

CALLOUT: The Hostage Crisis and Operation Eagle Claw

The Shah, dying of cancer, was admitted to the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. In Tehran, rumor circulated that the Carter administration intended to repeat 1953 and restore the Pahlavi monarchy by force. On November 4, 1979, a group calling itself "Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line" stormed the United States Embassy compound in Tehran. They took 66 American diplomats and personnel hostage; 13 women and African-Americans were released within weeks and one was released for medical reasons in July 1980, leaving 52 hostages who would be held for a total of 444 days (Iran hostage crisis, Wikipedia, n.d.; U.S. National Archives, n.d.).

The students dubbed the embassy the Lāneh-ye Jāsusi — the "Den of Spies" — and spent months painstakingly reconstructing shredded classified cables, publishing dozens of volumes of "documents seized at the U.S. Den of Espionage" that the regime still cites today. Khomeini, who had initially been ambiguous about the seizure, endorsed it within 72 hours when he saw its mobilizing potential. It allowed him to purge moderate provisional Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, brand any domestic critic an American agent, and consolidate clerical control of the new state. The hostage crisis was the engine of revolutionary consolidation.

A subset of six American diplomats who had escaped the embassy were sheltered by the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and the Canadian embassy staff and exfiltrated on January 28, 1980, using forged Canadian passports and a CIA cover story about a fake science-fiction film called Argo — the basis of the 2012 Ben Affleck film of the same name.

By the spring of 1980, with diplomacy stalled, President Jimmy Carter authorized a Joint Task Force rescue mission code-named Operation Eagle Claw. The plan called for eight Sikorsky RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters launched from the USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea to rendezvous with Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft at a remote desert airstrip in central Iran designated Desert One. The C-130s carried fuel bladders, Delta Force operators commanded by Colonel Charlie Beckwith, and the staging package for a follow-on raid into Tehran (Operation Eagle Claw, Wikipedia, n.d.; Britannica, n.d.-b).

The mission required a minimum of six operational helicopters to proceed. En route, a dust storm (haboob) and mechanical failures progressively reduced the helicopter force. Helicopter 6 turned back with a rotor blade warning. Helicopter 5 turned back after suffering instrument failure in the dust. A third helicopter, BIM-5, arrived at Desert One with a hydraulic failure and was declared unflyable. With only five operational helicopters, Colonel Beckwith — overruling some objections — recommended mission abort. President Carter concurred.

During the withdrawal, as the aircraft repositioned for refueling and departure, one of the RH-53D Sea Stallions collided with a parked EC-130 Hercules. Both aircraft erupted in flames. Eight American servicemen were killed: Major Richard L. Bakke (Air Force, navigator), Major Harold L. Lewis Jr. (Air Force, pilot and aircraft commander), Technical Sergeant Joel C. Mayo (Air Force, flight engineer), Major Lyn D. McIntosh (Air Force, co-pilot), Captain Charles T. McMillan (Air Force, navigator), Staff Sergeant Dewey L. Johnson (Marines, helicopter crewman), Sergeant John D. Harvey (Marines, helicopter crewman), and Corporal George N. Holmes Jr. (Marines, helicopter crewman).

The failure destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency and humiliated the United States. The subsequent Holloway Commission Report (Special Operations Review Group, 1980) identified critical deficiencies in inter-service coordination, intelligence preparation, and special operations command authority. Its recommendations directly produced the establishment of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg in 1980 and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (the "Night Stalkers") in 1981 — the units that would, four decades later, conduct the missions that killed Osama bin Laden and Qassem Soleimani.

Iran's calculation after Eagle Claw was simple: Carter was politically dead and a hostile Ronald Reagan was incoming. The regime had no interest in handing Carter a victory and every interest in not giving Reagan a pretext for the kind of action Carter had failed to execute. The Algiers Accords, brokered by the Algerian government and signed on January 19, 1981, unfroze approximately $7.9 billion in Iranian assets and established the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal at The Hague (Algiers Accords, 1981, Wikipedia, n.d.). The 52 hostages were released minutes after Reagan's inauguration on January 20, 1981 — a final, calculated insult to Carter.

The Iran-Iraq War and Khomeini's Death

Saddam Hussein, observing the chaos in revolutionary Iran, the purge of the Iranian officer corps, and Khomeini's calls to export the revolution to Iraq's Shia majority, invaded Iran on September 22, 1980, seeking to seize the oil-producing Khuzestan province and the Shatt al-Arab waterway (Britannica, n.d.-c). The war lasted eight years. Estimates of total killed range from 500,000 to over one million. Iraq employed mustard gas, sarin, and tabun nerve agents — the first battlefield use of chemical weapons since the 1925 Geneva Protocol — killing approximately 20,000 Iranian soldiers outright and wounding an estimated 100,000, many of whom died slowly in the decades that followed (Wilson Center, n.d.; Science, n.d.). Iran responded with human-wave assaults of conscripts and the Basij — adolescent volunteers as young as twelve, wearing plastic "keys to Paradise" issued by clerics, sent to clear minefields with their bodies (HistoryNet, n.d.; New York Times, Smith, 1984). It was on this war's anvil that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its external-operations arm — the Quds Force — were forged into the apparatus that would terrorize the region for the next forty years.

Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. Within 24 hours, the Assembly of Experts named Ali Khamenei — who at the time held only the rank of hojatoleslam, not even ayatollah — as the new Supreme Leader. To make the appointment constitutionally legible, the Constitution was hastily amended later that year (Iranian Revolution, Wikipedia, n.d.). Khamenei has now ruled longer than the Shah did. He is the captor.