Published: March 2026
Why the 1979 Iranian revolution was supported by the United States.
The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran is often presented as an anti-American and anti-Western revolution. In reality, the 1979 revolution was supported and facilitated by the United States – a fact neither supporters nor opponents of the current Islamic Republic of Iran like to talk about.
Although denied for decades, it is now widely known that in 1953, the United States and Britain overthrew the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and re-installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as monarch (shah) or dictatorial governor.
This early “regime change”, code-named Operation Ajax, was driven by Anglo-American oil interests – Mosaddegh planned to nationalize the Iranian oil industry – as well as by an early Cold War fear of increasing Communist influence on politics in Iran (as in some Western European countries).
25 years later, in January 1979, a popular uprising forced Pahlavi – weakened by cancer and without an adult successor – to flee the country. The United States now once again faced the risk of a Communist takeover, as had happened just one year earlier in neighboring Afghanistan during the Saur Revolution – to which the US responded by arming Islamist fighters, later known as “Al Qaeda”.
From the American perspective, there were really only two good options in Iran: a military dictatorship – an option repeatedly enforced in Latin America and elsewhere but which would have been very unpopular in Iran – or an Islamic Revolution, which at the time enjoyed broad popular support in Iran and would also prevent any political influence by atheist Communists.
Given this situation, prominent Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, accompanied by American and European journalists, was flown in to Tehran from his exile in France. Publicly supporting Khomeini, the US ambassador to Iran described him as a “Ghandi-like figure”.
It later became known that already during the 1953 Anglo-American regime change, Khomeini belonged to a group of British-sponsored Iranian clerics that helped organize protests against Mosaddegh. There is also an unproven theory that Khomeini may have had a British father.
One of the main reasons why many people assume the Islamic revolution in Iran must have been an anti-American revolution is because of the common conflation of the Iranian revolution and the later Iran hostage crisis. But the Iran hostage crisis was not part of the Iranian revolution.
The Iranian revolution was over by February 1979 when the Islamic republic was established. For much of the remainder of the year, the US and Iran had reasonably friendly relations. However, Iran wanted Reza Pahlavi to “face justice” in Iran and return billions in Iranian assets stashed abroad.
Instead, in late October 1979, Pahlavi’s friend and private banker, David Rockefeller, who at the time was chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the US Council on Foreign Relations, pressured the Carter administration to admit Pahlavi into the United States – for cancer treatment.
The Iranians however feared that the US might recognize an Iranian government-in-exile and initiate a counter-revolution. Thus, barely two weeks later, in early November 1979, adherents of the Islamic republic went ahead and pre-emptively seized the US embassy and CIA station in Tehran.
This move didn’t come as a surprise: it was exactly the response that a reluctant Carter administration had feared and expected. There was even a theory at the time that David Rockefeller had hoped to achieve such a crisis, as it allowed him to freeze an earlier $500 million loan to Iran.
The subsequent hostage crisis was prolonged by a secret Israeli initiative intended to oust a skeptical Carter and install movie actor Ronald Reagan as US President, who was backed by the Hollywood branch of the Israel lobby and Jewish organized crime – the original “October Surprise”.
The final break between Iran on one side and Israel and the US on the other side came only when the US supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 – which caused the eight-year Iran-Iraq war and the “Iran-Contra affair” – and when the Shia Republic of Iran began to support Shia militias that opposed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (i.e. Hezbollah).
After the mysterious and unsolved events of September 11, 2001, the US Pentagon developed a plan to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran” – countries opposing Israeli and US hegemony.
25 years later, after the first six countries on that list had been “taken out”, Israel and the United States attacked Iran. As in the cases of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the attack on Iran began in the week of the Jewish Purim festival, which celebrates the destruction of the “enemies of the Jews”.
Despite seemingly limited popular support within Iran, late Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s eldest son, Reza Pahlavi, hopes to return to Iran as the new Iranian monarch. Reza Pahlavi visited Jerusalem and the Western Wall in 2023 and the Israeli-American Council National Summit in 2024, while his daughter married an American-Jewish businessman in 2025.
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You have been reading:
The Secret of the 1979 Iranian Revolution
An analysis by Swiss Policy Research
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- US had extensive contact with Ayatollah Khomeini (Guardian 2016)
- The Real Iran Hostage Crisis: A CIA Covert Op (Mansoor, GRC, 1995)