Our Man in Tehran

Very few people believed that the end was near.

It was a game that we had to win.

People were in real danger.

This wasn't a movie, this was real life.

You could hear executions outside;

you could hear firing squads; you could hear screaming.

I have thought often, what would I have done

in a circumstance like this?

I expected I would take these stories to my grave.

Nobody would ever know.

My name is Ken Taylor.

I arrived in Iran as Canadian ambassador

in the fall of 1977.

Off-screen: Ken Taylor, take one.

And concluded my post in January 28th, 1980.

When an ambassador arrives, he or she is a non-person

until they present credentials to the host government.

In the Shah's time, this was a ceremony of grandeur.

It was one taken very seriously by the Iranians.

I'd been posted to London and had been among others

to a reception at Buckingham Palace and

Buckingham Palace really was an aged palace.

It was almost threadbare in comparison to the Shah's.

Gradually you made your way to

the Shah's reception room.

The Shah is in a suit of pure white with decorations.

In every sense of the word, this is a monarch

who believes that he's a monarch.

He has influence, he has power,

and he's got ambitions for his country.

This shah, he was just the son of a...

an Iranian army officer who staged a coup and

declared himself Shah, declared himself successor

to all these other emperors of the glories

of the Persian empire.

My name is Joe Schlesinger, and for decades

I was a foreign correspondent for the CBC and covered

all sorts of conflicts all over the world,

and one of the more memorable ones was the one in Iran.

The Shah had an iron will.

He was going to make it a modern state,

this backwards country, he was going to make it modern,

he was going to resuscitate the

glories of the Persian empire.

He tended to play up the Iranian side of things,

the heritage of Persia.

My name's Roger Lucy.

I was first secretary at the Canadian embassy.

I was responsible for

reporting the political situation in Iran

and there was a lot going on in Iran,

so it kept me busy.

The Shah was trying to make Iran

into a great power.

He hoped to equal Germany

by the end of the century.

People were expecting things to get better and better,

and they weren't getting better and better for everyone.

Iran had oil, but oil didn't matter that much

until 1973, when the oil states,

Iran participating,

created the oil crisis and the price of oil

just went up to the sky. And all of a sudden,

Iran, a poor country, was rich.

I always took my economic indicators in a way

rather than from statistics,

from the bar of the Hilton hotel.

At the bar of the Hilton hotel, it was the...

it was where everybody met at the end of the day.

And the more caviar they sold, I figured

economic indicators were up.

Suddenly there were all sorts of salons

from Paris opening up,

foreigners making money,

bars in a country in which people didn't drink.

People are always happy to ban pleasures that they

themselves cannot afford, so that could strike a

real chord when you saw people living a

dissolute western life while they themselves were,

were finding it harder and harder to

get enough to eat.

At the same time there was also a growing rift

between the clerics,

those visibly committed to the faith,

and the more Westernized Iranians.

You could sense the increasing tension

within the population.

All through this time the Iranian people

liked Americans.

And they weren't necessarily hostile to

the American government.

My name is William Daugherty.

My position in the American Embassy in Tehran

was primarily as a case officer for the

Central Intelligence Agency, a street operations officer,

which gave me access to the individuals

that we hoped to target and recruit.

Is the CIA active in Iran today?

Probably yes, and why not?

So you're not worried about

-whatever they might do here? -I don't think so.

Because we might differ...

on some issues eventually

with our good American friends,

but there are many more things that

link us together than separates us.

The Nixon administration came in and they had this grand

geo-strategic idea of allowing Iran

to become the policeman of the middle east...

which fit in with the Shah's

desire to be a major world player.

We particularly welcome you and the Empress,

as good friends, and old friends.

We treasure that friendship,

and from that friendship

we hope to work together toward a better world

for both of our peoples.

The Shah had more leverage with us

in many respects, than we did with him.

He was determining the price of oil,

which was absolutely critical to American domestic politics

and he was also

defending our interests in the region,

so our leverage against him was really pretty limited.

My name is Gary Sick.

I was the point person in the White House,

the chief aide for Iran in the National Security Council

during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.

And I think a lot of people don't understand

that 1972 was a real turning point.

It was the change from a position where you could

argue that the Shah was really beholden to us...

to the reverse.

Kissinger, on behalf of President Nixon,

wrote a memo to the Department of Defence,

and it said: "Sell the Shah of Iran

anything he wants except a nuclear weapon."

One of the things, for example,

the Shah got seventy-two F-14 Tomcat jets,

just brand new.

Iran was the only country in the world

that the United States sold the F-14s to.

The Iranian people said,

"we don't want to be a world power.

We have the poor, we have the impoverished,

we need the education...

why is the regime giving billions of dollars

to the U.S.

for things that did not come back

to benefit the people?"

My name is Zena Sheardown.

My husband was the first secretary at

the Canadian Embassy in Tehran.

We did have a choice of postings

and we thought that

the Shah ran a very tight ship and

of all the places we were asked to go,

this one seemed to be the most stable.

You know the Shah was firmly in control and

we never expected to have problems there.

As a diplomat, as a journalist,

as a banker, as whoever you were in Tehran,

you rationalized, you, you've

almost fooled yourself

into thinking that this regime,

this Pahlavi dynasty

was going to last into the indefinite future.

And then there was the New Year's Eve toast in Tehran.

The President had stopped over for the night.

There was a huge state dinner

for President Carter.

Before he went to that dinner

he asked several high level advisors

in his administration, what he should say.

And the general advice he was given was

to talk about the qualities of the Iranian people

or something to that effect

but don't laud the Shah.

Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah,

is an island of stability

in one of the more troubled areas of the world.

This is a great tribute to you,

your majesty, and to your leadership,

and to the respect

and the admiration and love

which your people give to you.

The toast to the Shah at New Year's was,

was taken very seriously by all parties, I think.

It gave the Shah the impression that the U.S.

was steadfast behind him, essentially no matter what.

Iranians who had perhaps been on the fence,

were not sure whether to

join this burgeoning, active,

dissident movement.

After that toast, they did.

And suddenly the whole thing sort of

came to a head around 1978.

There were huge demonstrations against the Shah

and the Shah reacted with brutality

by shooting people.