 Well, my own approach to the Iranian Revolution, to those years from the mid-70s up to 79, was really based on the fact that I'd been in Iran in the 60s, I'd been there in 1965. I was 19 years old, but I'd traveled around the country for two months. I learned some Persian, and at that time I was working with a small underground group called the Third Force, the Nuru-Yosefom. This was a group of Marxists who'd left the Communist Party because they were critical of Moscow's control of Persian communism there, an independent communist movement, what in those days was called Titoist after the Yugoslav leader. And I remember traveling two weeks it took me from Victoria Station in London by train to Istanbul, and then a boat along the Black Sea, and then a bus, and then hitchhiking, and finally getting to Tehran after two weeks. And in my bags I had some copies smuggled in of the journal of this group. The journal was called Nile, this is a Socialism, and I had a secret meeting, which had all been arranged beforehand, with somebody in a restaurant. I went to the washroom and I left the bag by the side of the basin, and then somebody came in and they took them and everything went well. But I got to see the country, I got a feel of it. After coming out and becoming involved with the opposition here, particularly over a major incident with the so-called Kachima, more to the attempt to kill the Shah, which a number of people who had been in Britain were framed for having been involved in assassination, I was banned from going to Iran. In fact, I wasn't able to go to Iran for many years. And in the mid-70s, when I began to work for an American-based research institute, the Transnational Institute, they planned a series of books on important Third World countries. And I began preparing this book, which was published now in the summer of 1978, so before the revolution, called Iran Dictatorship and Development. Now, in summary, the point of this book was it was a critique of the myth of Iran as the Second Japan, a critique of the Shah's myth of the Great Civilization. It said that Iran was a highly unequal country. There was a lot of corruption. Iran was conducting an aggressive foreign policy in Kurdistan and Iraq, in Oman, in Darfur and elsewhere. So it was a book that was against the Shah. But it was also a book that was against the presuppositions of the opposition, because very tightly the book was there was dictatorship, but there was also development. Iran wasn't simply, as many of the opposition said, a feudal country. It was a country that was being transformed. Many of the things the Shah had set out to do in the White Revolution had had consequences, maybe not the ones he wanted. But 70% of people worked in industry of some kind. Maybe there were small carpet shops, but it was still some kind of industry. The country was urbanizing, education was spreading. Iran was changing, which the opposition didn't want to admit, and that's why some of the opposition also denounced me. So this book was published in the summer of 78, just as the big demonstrations began. Now, I never predicted the revolution. I did not expect this regime to fall. And for one reason above all else, I was a young Marxist researcher in the mid-70s, late-70s, and just beforehand had happened the Kuwaiti in Chile in 73, Kuwaiti's in Brazil. Ten years before they've been the Kuwaiti in Indonesia, which a million people were killed. The Bathis had staged a coup d'etat in Iraq in 68 when Saddam Kintabar. I did not believe, I did not expect, that this state would crumble. And for me, one of the big surprises, even in the weeks up to the middle of February 79 when the regime fell was, how come this army of 400,000, which was well paid, which had not been defeated in the foreign war, how come it crumbled, fell away to nothing? So I began to be interviewed as the events developed by the BBC English Language Service, really from August 79. I must have done dozens of interviews for them. By ITV, there was a flagship counterfeits program, The World This Weekend, which Brian Walton did on a Sunday, it was several times on that. And by American and Canadian and other TV. So that gave me a certain insight into the news process. When the debate began to take place about the role of the BBC, I wasn't directly involved. And I wasn't one of the people mainly fingered by the critics of the BBC, like Lord Jalfant, or by British diplomats, or by Papis Raji, who was the Iranian ambassador here in London. But I remember noticing this debate. I remember having some reflections on it. And I remember when I went to Tehran, after when my book was published in Persian in the summer of 79, and I went, I remember people in the street used to say, Tom Molle BBC, Molle Inglaistan, you brought Khomeini, if you lift Khomeini's beard, it says Made in England, in Angelobe BBC, all this kind of stuff. What's my view? I think the BBC, both the English language and the Persian service did a very professional job in a very difficult situation. Nobody is like the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 80s, 10 years later, or like the recent financial crisis in 2008. You have a huge story, nobody knows what's going to happen. There are many rumors. There are some people, both sides trying to give you false stories. I mean, at the time of the revolution, and ever since, both opponents and now the Islamic Republic tried to feed false stories to the BBC and tried to trap correspondence, tried to trap people here with false stories so they can then say, ah, you made this up. So of course, they didn't get everything right, but they followed the story in a responsible way and their job was to tell the truth. Stepping back as a student of the revolution, I mean, like many people, I've sat down and said, okay, what did happen? Why did it happen? What are the causes of the Iranian revolution? And I've written about this, some freestanding analysis. I've written comparative studies, as have other people. The BBC didn't play any role in the Iranian revolution. The Iranian revolution wasn't made in Bush House or in the Old Witch, in WC2. The BBC was made on the streets of Tehran and in the barracks and in the palaces of Tehran and in the mosques. That's where the revolution was made. So in a broad historical sense, or sociological sense, the BBC is completely irrelevant to the revolution, completely irrelevant, because Khomeini had his own system of communication by sending cassettes and sending messages to the mosques. The BBC didn't publish the time and are calling people to come to demonstrations. The people didn't need to be told by BBC that there was corruption in Iran or that the Shah was linked to the West. They knew this very well anyway. So in a fundamental sense, the whole argument about the BBC and the Iranian revolution is just irrelevant. It's a silly red herring put out by people like Jalfont here and other people, or by British diplomats, but also as a reflection of Iranian political culture. Since the Shah's regime and the Shah in particular could not understand what was happening and never did understand, and since the pro-Sahar people to this day have not understood what happened. As we say in English, they haven't understood what hit them. They're not interested in the serious analysis of why this regime collapsed. They want to conspiracy theory. And the easy thing to do is to say Sadae Stemari English, or Sadae Englistan. It's the English voice of English imperialism. Since they think Britain controls everything, and since they think equally falsely that the media control everything, which is also untrue, the media doesn't, they come up. But in broad terms, it's just a nonsense. It doesn't amount to anything. Now, in terms of my own specific experiences, I cannot recall any interviewer trying to lead me on or trying to get me to say things I shouldn't have said or in any way trying to distort what I'd said. And I see many other people who were being interviewed who also knew about Iran. I mean, at that time, there was a very prominent British writer on Iran, Roger Cooper, who had lived in Iran for a long time. And to me, it was a source of enormous gratification that Roger Cooper's analysis of Iran, knowing the countries he did, but without the external perspective I had, he and I coincided on almost everything in our views. And remember, Roger giving a very interesting talk at Chatham House, probably in the autumn of 78. And he made the point that the Shah never gave interviews to correspondence residents in Iran, only to visit in correspondence. Why? Because the ones who lived in Iran knew too much. If you actually said to him, you know, there are shanty towns or there's corruption. He would say, what? I don't believe all this and so on. Well, the foreign visiting the Chalfons or other firemen who came in weren't going to ask any such questions. Obviously, the Shah's people also put a lot of effort into manipulating the information. Let's not forget, they also tried to, they had their own propaganda. They had their own way of trying to win a favor over. The embassy here was very active. So if we're talking about media bias, there was a huge propaganda campaign in favor of the Shah. I mean, I can show you 10 books written by Western journalists and politicians in the 70s which are pure propaganda in favor of the Shah. They're rubbish about this Shah's land reform being the most wonderful land reform in the world. The Shah's land reform had huge effects in Iran. It wasn't just propaganda, but it wasn't the wonderful land reform it made out it to be. Or about how the Persian political system, Rastakhi's party and the other party, whatever it was called, Mad Nom or whatever, was a real functioning purist party and so forth. I mean, all this propaganda written by people didn't know anything about the country. So there was propaganda, but it didn't fundamentally affect the outcome. Yeah. If the BBC was not really that relevant, then why do you think Anthony Parsons was the ambassador, as well as inside the foreign office? There was a serious discussion about the role that the BBC was playing. You know, it was obviously, the Shah had taken it really seriously. So what do you think? I think I met Parsons after the revolution and had a very, very interesting discussion with him. Which I'll tell you about in a minute. If you're a British diplomat in a foreign capital and there are complaints about the BBC, this can make your life quite uncomfortable. The same would go in Saudi Arabia. The same goes now in Iran, obviously, under the Islamic Republic. Same would go in Kazakhstan with Nazarbayev. These sensitive and censorist regimes. You have to respond if they're making life difficult that it's affecting British trade or it's affecting the security of British civilians. You have to respond by saying, can the BBC please not publish the stories they're publishing? But it's not the same as saying that they really believe that the BBC is the cause of what's going on in the country. And if we come to Parsons, Parsons, I never knew it, didn't know at all, but when he came back to London, it seems to be ambassador, he was, I think, appointed head of the Middle East Department in 1980. And sometime in the summer of 1980, he asked to see me. And I went to see him at the foreign office. And he was extremely forthcoming and extremely friendly and very direct. And I asked, we got talking after he was, he had been a British serving army officer, not just in his youth, but I think for quite some time, including being posted in Iraq. So he understood armies. And we got discussing the question, why did the army not suppress the revolution? Why did the army crumble? And he agreed that this was the absolutely key question. The question of how for many mobilized people, how he got my people, that's itself a very interesting question. But I think we know more or less how that happened. And he gave, he told me two things which stuck in my mind very clearly. He said, first of all, you have to look at the structure of the Iranian armed forces. That a very small percentage of the armed forces were professional soldiers, were people whose lifetime career and whose sort of social interests lay within the army, the imperial guard maybe. But the majority of the army, the majority of the people sent onto the streets, in the latter part of 78, were doing their two or three years in the army. So they were on a barricade or they were in Jaleh Square shooting or being shot at, not being shot at, being attacked and so on by the opposition. But it was their brothers, their cousins, their family who were on the other side and they knew that in two years' time they would also be on the other side of the barricades. So the major component of the army were people who had no loyalty to the armed forces and who identified more with the people than with the regime itself. That was the first one. Secondly, he said to me, he said, people go on at me, Parsons, why didn't you stage a coup d'etat? He said, we didn't stage a coup d'etat. The 5th of November, I think it was as general, as Hari, staged a coup d'etat. He tried to impose martial law. He said, that was a, and he said, I can tell you, as British ambassador, from the inside, that was a serious attempt to stage and impose martial law. And we failed. It failed completely. Failed because, sorry, himself had a heart attack and was weak. It failed because of the lack of cohesion of the office of court. It failed with the strength of the opposition. But there was to say, oh, there was no, you know, the army never tried to impose order. The Shah never tried to crack the web. It's not true. They tried and they failed. And interesting that he said that. And he said, having failed, then everything that followed later and the lack of cohesion of the office of court and the disintegration of the army that followed. So in all the literature and in all the memoirs, I've read in the 30 years since the revolution, he came the nearest to addressing this very, very interesting question. I mean, there are two interesting questions about the ringrooms. How did Khomeini, this old man in a beard sitting on the floor in Najaf, managed to mobilize millions of people? That's under the slogan of religion. In a country where two generations before, a generation, everybody was talking in secular political terms. That's one question. And the other, but we've got explanations by Abraham Yan, many other people. For some, he's a beta written on this question, convincingly. The question of the other side, why did the state collapse? Very few people have looked at it. And here we come back to the BBC. Because until and unless you have an explanation of why the state collapsed, you have no explanation of why there was an Iranian revolution. And therefore you come up with conspiracy theories. What I do know, talking of context of diplomats, is after the revolution, some months afterwards, the foreign office asked, it's one of its internal units, to carry out a retrospective analysis. What did we get wrong in regard to Iran? How could we have got things right better? Not how could we have stopped the outcome, but how could we have positioned ourselves better? Including the UN interview and so forth. And this was carried out by later Senators Braithway, who is later a very prominent and very clever ambassador to Moscow. Not especially it's done Iran, but a very shrewd person. And again, he gave me a very interesting account of this document. I don't know if it's been yet released. And he said basically, things are moving very quickly. And he said, the bottom line of my investigation was, you have to calculate exactly at what point to abandon your friends. He said, the key thing is, when do you betray your friends? This is the key question. He said, and we got it wrong by a month. We stayed at the UN interview with the cases. We should have ditched the Shah or distanced ourselves from him a month or two before we actually did. He said, this was the conclusion. Not that we could have had enormous foresight because these events are unpredictable, but that Britain stayed close to the Shah for too long. And for all sorts of reasons, including the Shah's propaganda and the machine and the many friends he had in this country, and the fact that people got used to him and so on and so forth. Now, in all of this, there may be some important subjective factors as well. Clearly, the fact the Shah was ill and much iller than people knew with cancer. Parsons told me he didn't know till very, very late that the Shah had cancer. This may have led people to trust the Shah's judgment more, but I think we have to say at the time, and with retrospect, I would say exactly the same thing. This revolution was an enormous surprise. I mean, it was like a streak of lightning on a summer's day. I don't know. It happened very quickly. Also, I think the fact that it was, by comparison with other revolutions, not a bloody affair. I mean, probably now, the figure of 3,000 people killed. There was a lot of blood, people putting blood on their hands, and there was a lot of talk of death and death to the Shah and martyrdom and a lot of posturing and some shooting in the streets. But if you compare it to, there was no guerrilla warfare. There was no military insurrection. There were no serious mutinies until the very end in February, February the 11th and 12th around then with the Air Force cadets. But it was curiously, I mean, the Shah's army had guns, but they hardly used them, except in November, set in Jales Square in September and November. At the opposition, there were no guns at all. So in an odd sense, it didn't, it had the drama of a major public with all these huge demonstrations, probably the largest, you count the country as a whole, the largest coordinated demonstrations in human history of an opposition kind. Eight, 10 million people in the streets. Humanities never seen such a thing before, or since never, anywhere. But there wasn't much, people weren't being killed. I mean, there were talk of people being killed and there were certain very particular incidents like the burning of the cinema wrecks and the Jales Square killings in September. But perhaps for that reason, it still had a sense of being make-believe or not quite real. And that's another reason people didn't see what was actually gonna happen. But then revolutions very often don't. I mean, it's a famous story, Louis XIV in his diary for the key day in the French Revolution, for July the 14th, 1789. What does he put in his diary? Today, nothing happened. So the same may apply in the Iranian case. But again, this regime now is engaging in all the silly tricks of the Shah's regime, show trials and blaming the media and all the rest of it and looking for scapegoats. They're not prepared to address the fundamental problems which the country has, but they are prepared to kill and therefore they'll stay in power against more opposition than the Shah did.