I just finished a newly-published first person account of events in Iran over roughly a 20 year period between 1970 and 1991 – A Time to Betray by Reza Kahlili. Like similar personal chronicles of survivors of the Holocaust and comparable Twentieth Century atrocities, the depravity and cruelty of the Iranian mullahs with their Revolutionary Guard zealots defies any rationalization. As this aberrant behavior took hold among those who had ousted the Shah, the author turned from moderate Khomeni supporter to active CIA operative.
Even as I watched the video of the student rioters Islamic thugs surging over the fences of our Embassy in Tehran so many years ago, my first thought was "They would never even have dared try this if we had a President worthy of the office." Certainly the ensuing debacle of Carter’s obsequious entreaties to Khomeni and his radical Islamist supporters was painful for Americans to witness. Jimmie pea-nuts was the first American President to grovel before a foreign power – although it is also clearly the instinctive reaction for the current occupant of the office. As Khalili details, this was a deliberate, carefully-orchestrated assault intended to humiliate "the Great Satan" and exploit the weakness of the credulous incompetent in the Oval Office. Khomeni succeeded and the Islamists flocked to his cause.
Further, this success inspired and empowered the fanatics of the Revolutionary Guard and its counterparts in other parts of Iranian society. Khalili shows how the RG proceeded to infiltrate terrorist teams across the globe, create sub rosa links to rogue states such as North Korea, obtain weapons and training from their co-religionists, the PRC and the French (among others), ally themselves with localized terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction, Basque Separatists or IRA, how they created Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other organizations as fronts for their international jihadist campaign. And Jimmie piddle-pants? Well, he prayed they would find peace in their hearts. When he finally authorized action, the limitations he imposed on the resources committed and the RoE foreordained its failure – which further energized the fanatics.
The author’s focus is not on the US Presidents (although he does note in passing, chronologically within his narrative, how all of them since 1975 have failed the people of Iran in some measure at different points), but rather how Iran and its people have been butchered and intimidated by Islamic zealots. Still, I remember that fateful Sunday vividly, and my anger then was second only to what I would feel almost 22 years later. Thus, as Khalili documents the spreading cancer of the Iranian mullahs and the RG, it is impossible, for me at least, not to see how Carter’s pitiful, sniveling, behavior in 1979/80 opened the gates to these barbaric troglodytes.
The parallel of this to the Iranian nuclear weapons program and the current utterly unqualified incompetent is equally obvious. The disproportionate cost of Carter’s cowardly ineptitude must not repeated in the coming years with the far higher table stakes represented by crazed suicidal cultists on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, but for Jimmie piddle-pants, we’d not be faced with this horrific possibility in the first place. Only history will know whether he or Ø was the greater failure, but for the sake of our descendants, let us hope the former’s place is secure.
Moe Lane
PG DeFreese
Victoria Coates
Daniel Horowitz
Dan Spencer
This is an EXCELLENT book
frumiousfalafel Sunday, January 23rd at 3:53PM EST (link)Firstly, your focus on Carter is apt for an American (as I am) as Carter is as you point out, the *first* responsible for the subservient attitude that has, at times (then and now) so diminished American power and the *extension* of her power throughout the world. Carter should be “called out” for his utter lack of a proper response and his earlier paving the way for Iranian risk-taking to begin with.
Putting that aside however, the book as a while is simply an excellent read. What I liked about it particularly was how it was *not* just another book (although they are all good in their own ways) about a person who willfully entered the espionage industry from an early age, or who sought out danger.
Rather, here, while Khalili takes pains to say he did willfully seek out an initial contact with the CIA, he never thought nor imagined it going further than that. Of course now one can discern a certain naiveté of a young man in that thinking — but let’s remember, Khalili was a VERY young man when he performed this initial act — which, in and of itself and had it led to *nothing* more was incredibly *courageous*!
But when, as one might expect, the CIA asked him to “continue” — which was spelled out for him as actual spying — a 24/7 act of putting one’s own life and the lives of one’s family in terrible danger, he nervously accepted.
I can tell you that *I* would not have. I simply do not, and did not have that kind of incredible sense of self sacrifice that Khalili demonstrated at such a young age. And as he makes clear — although not explicitly, but in his plain-speak writing, he was neither seeking “adventure” nor was he under *any* illusion as to the risks entailed by his actions.
And indeed, much of the book touches on the painful deception he was *forced* by the necessity of protecting his family to lie, daily, to them. This is not the type of soul-searching reading one typically finds in “spy books.”
It is for those reasons and others that I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in either the *real* life of a *real* spy or the events *inside* the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as told by the first person to emerge from that organization, write a book and thankfully survive the entire ordeal!