The U.S. And Iran: What Went Wrong? - The Road to Victory

0:00 The governments of the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom recognize the assistance that Iran has given in the prosecution of the war against the common enemy, particularly by facilitating the transportation of supplies from overseas to the Soviet Union. This is the Declaration of the Three Powers regarding Iran, December 1st, 1943. Welcome to the United States of Amnesia. the podcast that reminds us of what we have forgotten. History doesn't just tell us where we've been, it shapes how we understand the present. Yet the past is never as simple as we remember it.

0:41 Over time, history becomes filtered through politics, ideology, and popular myth until the original story can be hard to recognize. History may not repeat itself, per se, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain once remarked. Join Marshall Newman, Mike Mendenhall, and Blake Hinckley as we explore history, politics, religion, and the connections between them. By understanding the past more clearly, we can better understand the present and prepare for history's next rhyme. During World War II, Muhammad Reza Shah, the son of the original Reza Shah, seeks to curry favor with the United States as a counterweight to the British and Soviets. But when Germany invades the Soviet Union in June of 1941, support to the Soviet war effort during World War II becomes a priority for the Allies, who view Iran as the, quote, Persian corridor, a vital route for the delivery of weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. World War II will be a turning point in America's relations with Iran. As the Cold War begins in its aftermath, America's focus in the region turns to containing the Soviets without regard to the wishes of Iran or its people, which

2:12 will have consequences. We are delighted to be joined again at the table by Sharon Bybee as our guest. She is a retired intelligence professional and the author of the sub stack Redacted No More. And she joins us again today. Welcome. Where are we now? with Iran. Iran has basically found itself caught between the British and the Soviets in August of 1941, in which the two powers, even though they had been allied only briefly, managed to put on a full -scale invasion of the country that defeated the army in about a week. World War II had begun in September 1939. And the Germans then invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, resulting in this happening two months later.

3:05 Two months later, definitely. So essentially what we see is a return, even after all this effort from Reza Shah, a return of the country being kind of partitioned between Moscow and London. back to where we were under the Kajers. And this is what he wanted to avoid. Yes, he had spent one -third, Reza Shah had spent one -third of the budget on the military, and this just melted away within a week. And he had aligned himself with Germany, or tried to. as a counterweight to the British and the Soviets. Unsuccessfully, but he had tried to. I mean, there was a lot of propaganda that was going on with Nazi Germany, and they were attempting to kind of draw Iran closer using Islamic themes of all things, showing that, you know, this was something we'd seen Germany do before where the Kaiser attempted a similar message there. And they... They attempted to portray Hitler's struggle against the Jews and communists as the struggle that the Prophet Muhammad had against the Jews, drawing parallels in chapters of the Koran and so forth in their effort to establish this sort of greater influence.

4:21 But the Russians decided that they were, and the British, that they needed to gain control over Iran, and so they accomplished this. But what they did in terms of doing this, it's not clear whether these fears that they had were genuine or not. What fears? The fears of Nazi takeover, of, you know, establishing sort of a fifth columnist quizling government like you see up in Norway and so forth. I don't think that that's necessarily going to be the case. And I'm not necessarily sure that Reza Shah wanted to be their friend. Reza Shah. and Iran wanted to be left alone. And again, there was a declaration of neutrality at the outset of World War II to disinvolve them in anything, not unlike what they were trying to do in World War I. You often hear these fantasy scenarios of German tanks arriving in all these ridiculous places all over the world with people that use what -ifs. There were never going to be German tanks in Iran or anything like that. That was way too far away.

5:26 No, I mean, the ability for them to be able to project power. The only way they could do this, and it's like, this is what people were concerned about, was say if Germany gained control of the Caucasus, and they're heading in that direction, you know, they get stopped at Stalingrad. But this is a fear that they are heading towards Iran. But I mean, the thing is, how you're able to do this, whether you're able to actually accomplish it, the logistics would support it. I would say no. to Georgia even today. It's the logistics, the road service. It's not easy to get around. And there's a period of time, particularly in the mountainous communities, which you'd have to go through to get down to Iran. where you can't really operate due to winter weather and so forth. Let's timeline this a little bit, though, to put a context into why the Soviets and British were doing this. Stalingrad's off in the future at this point. Yes, it is. That's well over a year away. Yes. What's happening at this point is the Germans have invaded the Soviet Union and are making spectacular gains on a week -by -week basis. Horrendous casualties, huge encirclement movements, the Russians, the Soviets losing 500 ,000. soldiers in one enveloping movement, 900 ,000 and another. Very fast advancement. They're almost at Moscow. In fact, before this Peter's out there, they can see Moscow, the lead units, German units bogged down before they get there, but they can see them. So at the time they make these moves, the Soviet Union is very much on the ropes, and Germany seems to be headed right toward Moscow to cut the country in pieces. So

6:57 that's the context there. The Soviets won't start to really have any success for well over a year in the future. So it doesn't seem crazy that the Brits are very worried about... The point I'm trying to make is that, you know, probably the Germans were never going to get to Iran and invade it and anything like that. But they were pushing through the Soviet Union. So the idea of needing to support the Soviet Union was very, very important to, well, to all the allies. And I mean, you know, it was just considering to latch on to your point there. Fantastic things were happening every day, so anybody who thought that they could disregard these fantastical scenarios that people would creep out, that would just not necessarily be the case. We can look at it from hindsight, but still. Now, what we're going to see happen over the course of the war is that the bridge of victory, which is a term Churchill coined, was going to be Iran. And this was going to represent certain changes to Iran. It's also going to, after the United States gets involved, it's going to make the Shah, who is Reza Shah's son, Mohammed, who most people recognize as the Shah, this is going to have an impact on his future strategy and calculations vis -a -vis America. So at this point, the United States is not in the war. Yes. We're talking the summer of 1941. The United States won't enter until

8:28 December of 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But at this point, the United States very obviously is a pro -allied neutral, providing aid of various kinds to the allies, despite being a neutral country. Well, once the United States gets in, it represents a different way of looking at Iran, because the British and... The Soviets are taking a more or less 19th century imperialist view of Iran, like it's there, it's ours, and we're going to move in there. The United States is actually trying to mitigate some of these actions. They're taking part in the occupation of Iran, but they're also, and I mean, they're the ones that are supplying the Lend -Lease material, but they're taking a much different view about...

9:21 how important it was for Iran to regain its sovereignty after the war. And that's a little bit different than what we're seeing from the other powers. Yeah, when we talk about the British, remember that this is still the British Empire. It still controls much of the surface of the earth at this point. And the Soviet Union, even though it's not the Russian Empire anymore, it still kind of is the Russian Empire. It's that mindset. It's that mindset. It's still a Russian nationalist dominated country. By a Georgian. By a Georgian, Stalin, yeah. But it's still very much pursuing Russian national interests, which reflect what Imperial Russia wanted to do. They didn't get to be the largest country in the world by playing tiddlywinks. So something to consider. While the war continued, we see all three powers making use of territory and transportation networks.

10:20 We do have a map. that kind of outlines those transportation networks. I'm not going to go into detail about that. Please take a look at them. We'll put the map in the image gallery for the series on our website. It will be very helpful to everyone to take a look at, to make use of this, because there's a lot of... geography about Iran that's not widely known in this country, and this is a way of, and also the kind of routes that were taken along the rail lines. And it also refers to pre -revolutionary place names, which are even more unfamiliar. Yes, yes. So what we saw in terms of forces that were actually deployed there, the United States has like about 29 ,691 personnel, aside to Iran, at its peak during 1944. USSR had 40 ,000 and the United Kingdom had 19 ,000. This is all about just, this is not necessarily occupying, but this is like part of a huge transportation network that was involved here. In addition, there were 100 ,000 Iranians. that were involved in this effort as well. They actually made a good living working for the Allies, especially the British, who paid top dollar, which is probably one of the few times I've ever read the British being characterized in this way of paying top dollar. Usually it's us. Top pound in their case? Top pound, yes.

11:42 The higher wages tended to lure agricultural workers away from the farm, which... which kind of increased the famine, which we're going to be talking about, or food shortages. So there was a labor shortage in the countryside, decrease in foreign production, and this kind of like was not the best outcome from Iran as a whole. There were individual Iranians that certainly made a good deal of money off of this. We probably need to talk about this concept of Lend -Lease and what Lend -Lease actually meant. And so, Mike, I believe you've got some thoughts on that. Well, dive in where you want to, but here are my thoughts. Yes. So, with the United States neutral during the first 27 months of World War II, we increasingly were leaning toward... supporting the allies. And if you listen to our America First series, you'll hear us talk about Lynn Lace. You'll hear us talk about isolationism that prevailed in the United States. But that began to change early in 1941. And there was increasing U .S. interest in supporting the allies in some way, if not getting directly involved in the war. And basically supporting the allies to avoid being drawn into the war. And because of isolationism, because of legal restrictions that the Congress had placed on actually exporting military equipment to the wartime allies, Roosevelt,

13:14 FDR, came up with an idea called lend -lease. And the idea was to work around the neutrality requirements by saying, we're not going to export equipment to the allies. What we're going to do is lend them equipment on kind of a free -lease basis. The understanding will be that if the equipment gets destroyed while it's in use, you don't have to make up for it. We'll just write it off. And at the end of the war, you're supposed to give everything that survived back to us. That way, it was just a loan. And, I mean, there was a rationale behind this because they had done, with the Nye Committee in the early 30s, an exploration of how trade had impacted U .S.

14:01 involvement in World War I. And the idea was... If we are not selling this, there is less of an economic interest that's going to be... deployed to force the United States to go into the war which was kind of the thoughts that people had from the experience of World War one what actually wound up happening by the end of the war I'm getting a little bit ahead of the story here I suppose but a lot of the equipment we didn't want it back because we didn't want to destroy our own economy by bringing every truck back here and never building another truck in the country for the next you know 20 years or something and it wasn't worth shipping it all back so we tended to like sell it to wherever we had delivered it on really Easy terms for really cheap. Deep discounts. You know, our old ships we didn't want, we just scrapped them overseas or whatever.

14:48 We didn't actually get a lot of it back, nor did we want a lot of it back. Some of the big ticket items like ships and things were returned. But anyway, that's how that all worked. It was more or less a legal fiction to give the Allies supplies without breaking the neutrality laws of the United States. And nobody was going to get upset about merchants of death driving us into the conflict. And it lasted throughout World War II. The program didn't end until the end of World War II. And in this context, and we talked about this in the America First series too, I believe, specifically related to the Soviet Union, the Russians don't like to admit this. And in fact, some of the historiography has changed over the years. There was an idea that, well, you know, Lend -Lease, it helped. the soviets clearly but you know they could have won the war without it anyway and that's kind of what the soviet story was about it in fact more and more historians are looking at it and finding out that the soviet union the soviet army ran on len lisaid to a very great extent like just the amount of trucks and things sent over there made it possible for them to engage in big operations because the germans and things like that they received a lot of they received tanks from us they received a lot of aircraft that they used So it seems to have had a bigger impact. I guess it's still somewhat controversial. But it really mattered in one way or to a greater or lesser extent, it really mattered that the Allies were shipping supplies and equipment to the Soviet Union during World War II. Khrushchev actually in his memoirs acknowledges the impact. And of course, Khrushchev, since he wrote them out of office, he didn't have to like, you know, promote the party line here that we did it all ourselves

16:19 here. Which brings us to Iran in World War II. And it was referred to by the Allies as the Persian Corridor. And that was how they referred to the use of Iran as basically a railroad path and highway to get supplies to the Soviet Union. We talked earlier, I think in the last episode, about how Churchill always referred to it as Persia so that nobody would get Iran and Iraq mixed up. But anyway, the name Persian Corridor stuck for what Iran was as far as the Allies were concerned in World War II. And this is still an imperial time. So, as we also talked about earlier, Iran was the square on the chessboard, and the imperial powers were putting their chess pieces on the chessboard. And that's why Iran was really the Persian corridor to them. There was no real consideration of local events in Iran in their calculations. And maybe that sounds terrible to people that are concerned about the welfare of the Iranians, but in the broader context, they were fighting a war against Nazi Germany.

17:16 That was the big issue in front of them. And Iran was relatively irrelevant. to them and their goal, the allies and their goals in comparison, other than as a geographic entity that provided access to the Soviet Union in terms of bringing supplies there. I don't know if it's true in other countries. I know in the United States, you almost never hear anything about the Persian Corridor. I think, Sharon, you were mentioning that. I studied Iran in school, in both college and in graduate school. And I went back and looked in some of my books and we looked at a little bit at the... tiny bit at the Qajars. We looked at Reza Shah, Mohammed Shah, and then we skipped right over and went to Mosaddegh and the revolution.

18:01 And we did not talk about Iran in World War II at all. I had to go and do research on this because we just did not discuss this even a little bit in school. And I mean, it's funny what gets the attention in terms of how we resupplied. the Soviet Union. It's actually the merchant ship runs that would go up, the convoys that would go up to Arkhangelsk and unload from there. That is not... Those are the famous Arctic convoys. The famous Arctic... And they are very dramatic, pushing through tough weather, harsh German opposition. A lot of famous things happened on the Arctic convoys. And you do hear a lot about that in American, certainly American historiography and British historiography. But you hear very little about the Persian Corridor because... there wasn't anything really terribly dramatic that was happening down there in comparison to places like the Arctic convoys. Yes. By the way, there was another route, which was to bring in supplies through Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East, the Pacific end. But there were issues there because Japan and the Soviet Union, even though they were on opposite sides of World War II, were neutral toward each other. And they actually were pretty scrupulous about enforcing that neutrality because they both had their hands full elsewhere and had no interest in fighting each other until the very, very end of the war. And so because of that, the Allies couldn't really ship war material to Vladivostok. They did send... Food. Food and

19:33 things like that. Not, you know, blankets, I suppose. You know, boots. Not weapons, not ammunition. The weapons and the ammunition had to come through other routes. And the two routes were the Arctic convoys and the Persian corridor. And I think 45 % of the aid. Yes. Is that right? 45 % of the aid that the Allies sent, a lot of that was the United States, went through the Persian corridor to get to the. The majority, it is by far the largest. uh means of transferring equipment is is through the persian corridor and i have i have some stats here so during the during the war the allies the via the persian corridor the allies delivered about 4 .4 million metric tons which in u .s short tons is something like 4 .8 million tons of lend lease aid yes which is about one -third of all the lend lease aid sent to the soviet union during the war this included Think of these figures. 180 ,000 ground vehicles of all kinds, including things like tanks, but also trucks and such, which really mattered.

20:35 Nearly 5 ,000 aircraft. And other things too, like millions of boots were sent, because you needed boots. And huge quantities of food, ammunition, aviation fuel, and raw materials like that. So this is a very important part of keeping the Soviet Union... during the early part of the war and then allowing it to engage in the counteroffensive to drive the Germans back out later. Yes, because most of its industry was located in areas that the Germans had managed to conquer at this point. You know, they had gone all the way to Moscow. And I have a vignette here just to give you an idea of kind of how this supply line worked, at least the maritime end of it. If you go up to Baltimore, Maryland, just about an hour north of where we're recording this, there is a Liberty ship. that's been preserved up there called the ss john w brown what's a liberty ship that was a uh type of general cargo ship that the united states uh manufactured in in massive quantities during world war ii and it wound up being one of the most critical ships for carrying uh supplies and ammunition and troops and weapons and everything else around the world during during the war serve that one you can you can go on board and take a cruise into the chesapeake bay like a six hour cruise they go out a few times a year Very World War II theme, big band music on the loudspeaker.

21:55 They give you lunch. There's an Abbott and Costello impersonator team that performs for you. Fake Japanese planes come out and attack you, and they shoot back with fake guns, and it's very loud, and it's exciting out there in the bay. It's fun. It's a fun day. I did that once years ago. But anyway, the John W. Brown. So she actually was one of the ships that went to the Persian Gulf. And I thought this might be interesting to give an idea since there's so little coverage of how this worked in U .S. historiography anyway. What was it like to do one of these trips and what was done? So the John W. Brown, when she was a brand new ship, she loaded in New York City, she loaded two Curtis P -40 Warhawk fighters. That's the kind of fighter plane that we talked about in the China series that Claire Chanel used for the Flying Tigers. Two of those, 10 Sherman tanks, that's the famous U .S. World War II tank, 200 motorcycles, 100 Jeeps, 700 tons of ammunition, 250 tons of canned pork lunch meat, so food too. She left New York with this cargo in October 1942, steamed down the East Coast in a convoy down to the Caribbean, steamed in another convoy further south. When she got further south into South America, she then steamed this long way around through the South Atlantic over to South Africa. She sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Why'd she take that long route?

23:10 Because the German U -boats were rampaging further north. And we didn't control the sea yet. And the Med was blocked by the Italians and the Germans at the time. So they had to go around all the U -boats to make her chances of survival greater. Went around Africa, went up to the Persian Gulf. That voyage took two and a half months. She got there in December of 1942. When she got there, There was so much traffic, shipping traffic in the Gulf, that it took her a month of being anchored in the Persian Gulf before she could pull into port. And she pulled into Abadan and unloaded the two fighter planes and some of the tanks. Then she had to wait another month and a half to have pier space to unload all the other cargo, which she did at Karamchar. And she finally unloaded the last of her cargo in March of 43. And then she headed back and retraced her route back to New York, and she got back at the end of May 1943. The voyage took eight months. But I just thought that's kind of interesting because it shows you the effort that went into providing these supplies, the lengthy voyages, the dangers the ships were encountering, the amount of time.

24:17 Think about how much shipping there had to be there for it to take two and a half months in the Gulf before you could even unload your ship. It's crazy because the Gulf really isn't that big. I mean, it just isn't. Yeah, and it was jammed back in early 1943. Now, once you got there, how did the supplies get to the Soviet Union? Well, there was the Trans -Iranian Railroad, which the Shah had built, right, which we talked about last time. Americans were heavily involved in that. We brought locomotives. Americans ran a lot of that train traffic up and down that route. And the train route went up to the Caspian Sea. And there they could unload the train, and then they could load it onto Soviet ships, which took it through the Caspian Sea and up the Volga River, which you can navigate for like 2 ,000 miles. Like around Ostracon. Yeah. And a lot of supplies went by water that way once you got it up to the Caspian Sea. But others went by train. You took them up to the Iranian -Soviet border, and you had to transship them to Soviet trains because they used a different rail gauge.

25:19 Put them on Soviet trains, and the Soviet trains could take them further. And you had trucks. that drove all the way or part of the way along that route you had trucks that drove all the way from the south of iran from the persian gulf all the way up into the soviet union other trucks would transship at other places some stuff went uh west of the caspian sea some went east of the caspian sea and uh they had to go east of the caspian sea for a while because as you talk you mentioned stalingrad so in 1942 the germans got as far as stalingrad was getting very close to the caspian sea and before the germans lost that solid ground and were driven back, the Luftwaffe was in range of the Caspian Sea and started bombing shipping going through the Caspian Sea. So the Germans actually got that close. Anyway, these were the roots, and it was very difficult circumstances.

26:04 I know, Marshall and Sharon, you both mentioned the terrain there in Iran isn't always the easiest to operate in. And I was reading somewhere that the guys involved in this, when they were in the south around... Khuzestan, the province in southwestern Iran, up at the northern part of the Persian Gulf. In the summertime there in the desert, you would get temperatures of 120 Fahrenheit outdoors and 130 indoors, which if you're a Celsius person, that'd be like 49 to 55 degrees Celsius. And then at other times of the year, you're going through mountains in snow, harsh, cold winter weather and things along these routes on the trucks, on the trains and everything. So it was quite an effort. It gets very little coverage. uh in in the west i think it deserves more than it got the problem is is that people get bored with logistics and they're just interested in you know people shooting and everything and i understand that that's more exciting but logistics is what makes the army run yeah and the navy and the air force run and they were really important and this is actually a really important effort that took place in world war ii yes it was now there was a kind of division that existed but amongst the allies in terms of what was going on and it kind of almost mimics the war itself because at the beginning The British are actually in charge of everything that's happening in the southern portion of Iran. That's because they already have a presence there with the oil fields and the refinery at Abadan. But there was also forces being tasked with counterintelligence, and there's still this worry about countering

27:36 a German invasion. which again goes back to how far the Nazis had advanced in 1942. British railroad forces supervised, and they are operating the Iranian state railroad system, and they're also providing security. Now, when the Americans come in, they take on much more significant responsibilities, not unlike what happened in the war writ large there. They ended up taking over the maintenance and security of the railroad networks, control of certain ports. And, you know, kind of like prioritizing what's being transported. It is American equipment there. We did the big logistical work, didn't we? Whereas the Soviets and the British were doing the security and those types of things, is my understanding. Yes. Yes, we were. And that was kind of like more where...

28:30 Our comparative advantage. Yes, in terms of what they were thinking about here. So the Soviets had their own responsibilities in the north, kind of as you alluded to, Mike. You know, the idea was protecting the Soviet southern flank. and preventing the use of Iranian territory as a means to strike into Soviet territory. So again, they're still concerned about Germany utilizing Iran for some sort of strategic advantage. And they don't trust the Western allies that much either. No, they do not. So they're looking at the future as to what's going to happen down there. There's a lot of difficulty in communication, just period, because nobody who's there in the Soviet sphere of influence wants to be rounded up after the war is over. and accused of having pro -Western espionage activities. The Soviets made a lot of use of Iranian employees, though, and this might have something to do with the fact that even though Iran is not the most modern of places... There may be some advanced mechanical capability that the Iranians had that the Soviets did not, just based on the way the society was structured. Well, when I was researching this, too, looking at the Persian Corridor situation, a lot of the aircraft and trucks were shipped there disassembled. Yes. And when they were unloaded at the ports, there were then workshops that assembled the planes, which then the Soviets would fly into the Soviet Union. Yes. And there were Studebaker trucks shipped from the United States, which were then assembled. in Iran and used on the truck routes. So there were mechanical

30:04 opportunities for Iranians that were created by the Persian Corridor. And essentially what we also saw happening at these ports and with the railroad lines, there are improvements that the Allies are making to facilitate the movement of supplies. up to the Soviets. And my impression is the United States is particularly important in improving the railroad. Oh, yes. Not just the provision of, we provided locomotives, but also in terms of the actual physical structure of the railroad itself. Well... Expanding the railroad also means that you can move rail lines into the ports so they can be offloaded onto the rail lines, which expedites the shipment of material and things. Which is no small feat, because to get from the ports over to the Caspian, you're having to cross two mountain ranges. So it's really quite hard. The issue, though, to keep in mind here is this is... The allies are focused on the war, and none of the improvements or any of the input to policy involve the Iranians at all. Everyone could operate more or less independent of any local laws. There wasn't an agreement on extraterritoriality like we saw in the 19th century on the Khazars. They just did it. In a sense, this is even less respect. that nobody's even trying to get some sort of agreement from

31:36 the allies for the legalities there. U .S. troops, for example, who committed a crime in Iran of some kind were subject to U .S. jurisdiction, criminal jurisdiction, but not Iranian criminal jurisdiction. No, not at all. Nobody was. British weren't. Soviets weren't. Folks, we have a new sponsor. Thumb Run Farm is a Virginia -based provider of locally raised, high -quality beef sold in wholes, halves, and quarters. The beef is certified natural, meaning that no antibiotics or hormones are ever used in the raising of the cows. Thumb Run Farm will deliver to you farm -to -table at astounding prices compared to the grocery store. So check out thumbrunfarm .com.

32:25 So while the allies had voiced concerns over the plight of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian citizens during World War II, really their main concern was winning the war. So when the Iranian government did raise issues with them, the potential solutions were always viewed through the lens of... how it would affect the war efforts. Really, people have described the occupation as a nightmare for the Iranians. It certainly created overlapping and reinforcing crises, mainly inflation and a transportation crisis. And both of those fed into, if not... technically a famine, and I think we might have used the word famine perhaps, than certainly a food crisis. Our old friend Arthur Millsbaugh said that Iran's inflation came about because of this demand for military shipping meant that there were fewer ships that were available to import goods, and because of the decrease in domestic... resulting from what he said was the disorganization and disorder caused by the invasion and the Shah's advocation. But quite frankly, I think that lets the allied forces off the hook a bit too much because a lot of the inflation was directly resulting from their being able to buy whatever goods were available on the market. They had a lot of money available and changing that much. pound sterling or American

33:58 dollars into Iranian rials forced the Iranian government to print more and more money, which made the currency market go out of whack. That's my technical terminology as a non -economist. Out of whack is probably as good a way of expressing it as anything. Who was Arthur Millspaugh? He was one of the Americans who periodically would show up to try to help the Iranians operate effectively their economy. He was hired by the government, the Iranian government. He was not there as an official U .S. No, he was not. He was most definitely not an official U .S. person, but the U .S. approved of him. doing this like they weren't going to strip him of citizenship or something but he was definitely an employee and uh not always popular with with razor shaw because of his insistence on having things balance out in terms of demand and supply of revenue yeah i think Sharon, you're talking about the inflation. My understanding, too, is the U .S. was pretty free spending. The United States in particular was pretty free spending in Iran because by World War II standards, we were the richest country. We had a lot of money to spend, and we couldn't afford and didn't need to haggle over things. Just buy what you need.

35:21 The bigger issue isn't the Iranian economy again. It's beating the Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union. So just buy what you need. And if you're an Iranian who doesn't have a lot of money, hey, I'll take your money. Of course. I'll take your U .S. money. But it's going to have detrimental effects. And it did create inflation. I'm not sure how high the inflation was, but enough. create Iranian resentment about how much inflation occurred. And this is, once again, us not understanding the culture. This is a culture where you generally go in and you bargain for things. So they're probably giving a really high price for things. And the Americans are coming in and probably just going, okay, fine, and paying that high price. And so the Iranians are going, okay. Plus for the Americans, it's probably cheap. Right.

36:02 They're getting a deal. Right. Yeah. So we've already talked quite a bit about how the transportation network worked. Civilian transport didn't stop at that time. But if you think about it, every truck that was being used to transport military material was one less truck that could transport food. Every tire that was being produced to transport all those military goods was one less tire that could transport commercial or agricultural goods. tied into the food crisis. But we were delivering a lot of trucks, though. It's not like we were just using Iranian trucks. True, but we were also making use of what was in the country. So it was all kind of compounding together. We were buying what was available in the country, and we were bringing things in. And you talked about how we were... building things in country as well. And Marshall talked about this as well.

37:06 So most of the country were peasant farmers, but we were pulling people from those farming jobs. And that also put a burden on the working force. So as we mentioned, a lot of the Iranians were enticed to leave their farms and go work in the plants where the Allies were putting together a lot of this war material. Yeah, there were two major plants that assembled nearly 200 ,000 military vehicles, including heavy -duty U .S.

37:54 trucks from Studebaker and Dodge. And there was a plant at Abadan where they assembled nearly 5 ,000 military aircraft. They also built 368 barges to operate on the rivers. It looks like, from what I'm seeing here, like about 80 to 90 percent of the labor force on the assembly lines for the trucks were actually Iranians. But this wasn't manufacturing trucks. This was taking parts that had been shipped in, knockdowns they call them, and then assembling it into trucks. So you didn't need to be very skilled laborer. You needed to know how to use a wrench and turn a bolt and those kind of things to bolt things together. That's what they were doing. So you could take people who had come from farms, from an agricultural environment, and put them to work in the plant without them having to be skilled factory workers by any stretch of the imagination.

38:43 This was something we had done in this country probably a generation before. And plenty of countries have followed this kind of a model. So there's something like 10 ,000 workers that worked in these truck plants, and about 10 % to 20 % of the workforce was foreign personnel, mostly American soldiers. British engineers and General Motors civilian technical advisors, and they played the role of supervisors, inspectors, and instructors for the assembly lines, but they didn't do much of the actual assembly work of turning the wrenches and things like that. They were also trying to show the Iranians how to engage in Western -style moving assembly line work. Which was the way of the future. The aircraft assembly was very different, aircraft being a very different thing from trucks. And there, where they assembled the aircraft, over 90 % of the critical assembly and testing was performed by foreigners. Iranians did work at the aircraft assembly plant, but almost exclusively for peripheral logistics.

39:37 So they were just doing things along the sides to keep the plant running. They weren't actually involved very much in the actual assembly of the aircraft, which did require more skill than assembling a truck did. So local Iranian workers made up less than 10 % of the aircraft assembly force. And mostly all they did was uncrate things, provide site security, move heavy components around, and also fuel the aircraft, things like that, but not much in the way of aircraft assembly. So it depended on which of the industries you were in. But it did clearly provide for, it looks like at least 10 ,000 Iranians, a chance to get off the farm and work probably for higher wages in a manufacturing environment, at least to some extent, unskilled maybe. So they're probably earning good money. The problem is inflation is running rampant, and Iran actually does need those crops to be grown. So again, those crises, those problems are starting to reinforce each other. So this food shortage, you're saying maybe not a famine, but a food shortage, was in 1942, 1943. Yeah, that was when it was the worst of it. Okay. And what's the death total that we have for that? The numbers, I haven't found any really good numbers. The highest number that I heard was 4 million. I think that's really overblown. Yes. Part of the reason it's hard to get good numbers is that there was no nationwide census until the 50s. So you don't have a baseline to work off of. There certainly were probably

41:09 areas out in the countryside where there were famine conditions. Food crisis in the cities is probably more. accurate. So I'm hesitant to throw out an actual number. I've seen a figure of like somewhere between 100 ,000 to 300 ,000 people probably died because of the food shortage. I would say at least that. Yeah. Yeah. At least that. At least that. Okay. Yeah. And that's a lot of people. So that was a significant problem in Iran in 1942, 1943. It is a significant number of people. And I think that By the time it really came to a head at the end of 1942 with the Turin Bread Riot, which sounds a little bit Marie Antoinette -ish with Let Them Eat Cake. I want to get into that a little bit. Things were really... quite dire for mostly for the lower class Iranians, who just did not have a lot of access to food at the time. Because they they weren't getting a lot of access to protein, they weren't getting a lot of access to vegetables. Basically, their entire caloric intake was bread. So if the bread if the wheat wasn't being grown, and then the bread and wheat that was being grown or baked was being hoarded for the most part by both Iranians

42:41 or if the supply was being bought up by the allies being shipped in some cases back to the Soviet Union by the Soviets who had access to the northern part where most of the crops were being grown or in the Brits were shipping it off to their troops in Iraq and the And the Americans were coming in with a lot of money as well and being able to buy huge amounts of supplies. So the lower class Iranians didn't have as much money and they just weren't able to buy very much at all. So you have these riots because they just were on the thin edge of starvation. In Tehran?

43:27 In Tehran and in the major big cities, yeah. And when were the riots? The riots were December of 1942, and it got caught up in a lot of politics as well because it was the prime minister trying to exert control and show that he still had control over Tehran and over the country. And it was lower class people being out in front of the modulus, demanding their rights, demanding for bread. Under Reza Shah, he had centralized the bread production in the major cities. So it was them trying to get what they thought was due them under the centralized production. And it wasn't working very well under the occupation.

44:13 And so then you come in with these military forces. And over a course of two days, again, the numbers. In any sort of riot, things get blown out of proportion. But perhaps as many as 600 people were injured, a handful, maybe a dozen killed. the prime minister was able to reestablish control, in part because the allies came down and voiced support for him. I was going to say these military forces were Iranian military forces. Iranian military forces. You didn't have foreign forces. No, these were Iranian military forces. But the allied forces voiced support for the prime minister, and that helped him maintain control over the situation. But yeah, they... The Iranian military forces staged machine guns and tanks at key intersections, and they were shooting at their own people trying to reestablish control during this time period.

45:17 And it did quell the protest. This prime minister, I don't know his name. I forgot where I saw this, but apparently... A lot of Iranians viewed him as sort of a tool of the British. As a puppet of the British or something? You probably forgot his name because I think they had like 10 prime ministers in the space of this time. One of them. So nobody can remember his name. I think this was Kavem. Yeah. Apparently he was not very popular among the Iranians. Thought he was just a puppet of the British. Yeah, a lot of people thought that he was a puppet. And the plight of the poor, Tehran's poor, really didn't improve even after this. The Allies did suddenly take notice of how bad the situation had become, particularly the Americans, and they tried really hard. I think, to increase supplies, but it took months before they were able to do so in any real way.

46:11 And one of the stories that came about that I thought showed how they, again, didn't understand the culture was that the american army is quite good at producing things in quantity and they're like we feed people in bulk we can do this we have ovens that can bake bread in large quantities so they shipped in ovens that could bake large amounts of bread but it was Ovens that are optimized for baking loaves of bread. And that's not what they eat in Iran. So it just really didn't work out for them. It really didn't help alleviate things very much. You're going to send them what you've got. You're not going to create special Iranian ovens for them, probably. In fairness, someone's going to have to meet halfway here, I guess. Except that, how do you make the bread work for those kind of ovens? If you just hand them the oven and don't teach them how to use it, it's not going to be very useful. Or if that's not the kind of bread that the people want, are they really going to change what they eat? Yeah, well, okay, that's true, too. It should be noted, I think, in fairness to the United States, that the United States was the only... country that actually tried to help the Iranian people out with food aid. The Soviets and the British took very little interest at all and just were interested in getting food into the Soviet Union. The United States actually was the one that tried to also provide food to the Iranians in Iran. And only the United States did that as far as I've been able to see. And in fact, the Brits... would hold out aid in an attempt to extract concessions

47:43 from the Iranian government. So they were using it basically as a means of extortion. I did see a note somewhere that U .S. Army truck drivers developed a reputation for being actually pretty nice to the Iranians because they knew there was a food shortage and they would share rations with Iranian people they ran across with on the roads and things. Yeah. So we did some good things, but I guess we were kind of clumsy about it. A little too late, kind of clumsy, kind of American -centric. A bit clumsy. Our intentions were there. We meant well. We meant well. What the riot was fairly successful at, however, was creating the conditions for the communist Tudor party to thrive, which was basically the last thing the U .S. government wanted to do. Don't the Iranians eat that flatbread? It's almost like a naan. Yes, there's actually a number of different types of bread that they eat. And I was just looking it up. But essentially, yes, there's some type that's similar to naan. One type is called a sangak. I'm probably totally mangling the pronunciation.

48:48 But it's sort of a long, oblong kind of bread. It's not really flat in that it is leavened. But then there's some other stuff that is more of an actual flatbread, but it's not a loaf -style bread like we have here in the West. Did I hear something mentioned about sawdust? Oh, as they were trying to spread out the flour back in like 42 -ish, Yes, they were sending out the wheat flour and they were trying to, the merchants would get this wheat flour and they would. The government was trying to spread it to make it go further. So they were adulterating it with barley and wheat husk. And the merchants, because they knew that they could get a premium for the pure flour, would figure out a way how to sift out the wheat husk and the barley and sell the premium. And then they would take that. barley and wheat husks and throw in all sorts of contaminants like sawdust and ash and dirt. So these people who were already really malnourished were then

50:20 getting bread made with all of these contaminants that was just essentially making them even sicker. They put dirt in the bread. They put dirt in the bread. Yikes. So there was a question about who was to blame for this food shortage or famine, whichever you want to refer to it as. And apparently what I saw is that the Soviets and the British said it was all the Iranians' fault, that it was all because of things like hoarding. It was because too many of them had not worked the farms, issues like that. They brought the food shortage on themselves was kind of what the Soviets and the British said. So there was no sensitivity whatsoever to the local conditions. Just it's your guy's fault. You're starving. You brought it on yourselves and we're not going to worry about it beyond that. Fix it yourselves. I think there was certainly enough blame to go around because absolutely some of the Iranians were hoarding and some of the Iranians were no longer working the farms. And there were some agricultural climate issues where. crops weren't yielding what they had yielded before. All of that's true.

51:25 But then all of those other issues were also coming into play where you had the ally troops who were able to buy the food that was available and the Iranians weren't able to buy it. And all the transportation crisis, it was just a number of things that were coalescing together and compounding each other. So there was profiteering that went on. Absolutely. And sure that happened. Another factor, we already talked about the free spending allies, the Americans spending so much money in the economy, which fueled inflation. So inflation was running at 450 % in Iran because of all the spending that was going on there. So when you think about it, that's going to bargain the price up of everything, including food. Whether it's been hoarded or not, food's going to cost more. That's what happens in inflation. So that added on to it as well. Yep. And you had this...

52:13 This system that Reza Shah had set up to try to centralize everything, which in theory sounds great, until suddenly it's just not working. And then they have no way of figuring it out. And the allies are kind of on top of it, doing their own system, and nobody is really figuring out a way of making that system work. It sounds to me like... it's not so much the allies are trying to create these hardships for the Iranian people. They just don't care. It's just that what they're doing, because they're so focused on fighting the Germans, which we have to say makes sense, okay? Absolutely. But by focusing on that and strictly on that and doing what they think they have to do to fight the Germans, they're simply not interested in and therefore not paying attention to local conditions. And by the time they figured out how bad things were, it really was just a little... Too little, too late. The damage had been done. Yeah. So from the Iranian perspective, especially the Iranian peasants' perspective, this was all this terrible thing that happened. From the Allied perspective, it was this unfortunate side effect that they weren't really paying any attention to. Yeah. Absolutely.

53:25 Yeah. Why don't we turn to a particular Iranian who was concerned probably more than most about the impact the Allies were having on Iran, and this is Shah Mohammad Pahlavi. He is somewhat insecure. He kind of felt like he was always in the shadow of his much more forward -thinking and much more dynamic father. And he certainly had a great deal of uncertainty about himself, which we will see come up time and time again in the future. His father ruled as Reza Shah.

54:16 Yes. And he ruled as Muhammad Reza Shah. Is that right? Yes, that is correct. Because we always have to keep, you know, he certainly, if we're going to talk about a leader who had daddy issues, he most certainly did. So the way that the Shah was regarded, according to one State Department official, is that he was a timid, weak, and colorless figure, and whom no one really had high hopes for him. Now, of course, Mohammed Shah, Shah Mohammed, had a great deal of high hopes for himself. was the site of one of the periodic Big Three meetings in 1943, November to December 1943. And this is Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meeting there. Now, there are pictures that are done of the interactions with the Shah and the leaders, even though no Iranian had anything to do with this conference that was being held in Iran. We have the Shah meeting with British Prime Minister Churchill, and he's saluting him.

55:25 Churchill's in honorific military attire at the time. This is kind of a breach of protocol, and it kind of shows you just how low in the pecking order the Shah actually perceived himself to be. A monarch, the head of the nation, would not be saluting Churchill, who is the prime minister, who is the head of state. They are not equals. Churchill is inferior to him diplomatically. There would be none of this saluting going on. The king of England would be equal to him. The king of England would be his equal. The Iranian prime minister would be the equivalent of Churchill. Yes. And that's how that would work diplomatically. Yes. And what Churchill is doing is Churchill is extending his hand in this picture to shake hands with. the Shah, a bit more familiar than you would be with a monarch. You're not usually supposed to touch a monarch. No, you're not.

56:14 You're not. So we have that. And Churchill didn't really spend a lot of time with the Shah. He was more interested in sort of promoting high morale amongst the British troops that were there. And there's lots of pictures of him visiting them, having his picture taken with them. Only the one picture with the Shah. There is a picture with Stalin and Molotov. and the Shah stands in between them, and I'll just say it looks kind of like a bunny rabbit standing between two cobras, which is kind of the attitude that Stalin and Molotov had. They were happy to have pictures taken with, you know, any future victim that they might encounter here. The person that the Shah wanted to meet and wanted to have his picture taken with was Roosevelt, because the Americans were seen as Again, falling into this role as a counterbalance to the Soviets and also the British Empire. FDR did not really think much of the King of Kings. And just to illustrate this, I've been to Hyde Park numerous times.

57:15 There's all sorts of pictures of monarchs in the Dresden Room at Hyde Park. There's no picture of the Shah. That's FDR's home. That's FDR's home, yes. And also Presidential Library, too. There is... The picture that I found is available on the website, but you don't see that much about playing. He does play up his relationship with Ibn Saud, though. There is a picture of them. Of Saudi Arabia. Of Saudi Arabia. But not of the Shah. Not of the Shah. It would be kind of like a counterpart in the region. And it's interesting, too, because FDR is already thinking in terms of a post -war world. Yes. You know, we've talked about that quite a bit in the China series, I remember. But, you know, he's looking at who's going to be the power players there, different parts of the world. Yeah. And he's not seeing the Shaw as one of those. He's not seeing the Shaw as one of them. The Shaw literally had to get down practically on his knees to beg for a two -hour meeting with FDR. And there is a picture of them. They're sitting on this couch, love seat. And the Shaw kind of looks bewildered and in over his head. And FDR is just not even paying any attention to him. He's just staring right out at the camera. He's looking at the photographer. We'll put these photos in the blog too, the image gallery, so people can see what we're talking about. We do have these pictures, and you can see for yourself what's happening here. Shaw views the United States as the coming power. And what he really wanted was he wanted

58:46 to do almost like a return visit, even though no one had asked him to visit his country like FDR. FDR wrote, did what would be called a bread -and -butter letter to the Shah. thanking him for letting them use his country for their conference. And he said, maybe someday you can come visit the United States. The Shah jumped all over this and basically saw this as an invitation, a real invitation, not like a pleasantry that one would put in any sort of like letter thanking you for your hospitality. He saw this as FDR wanted him to come and visit. And this was a thing that he would get to. with U .S. diplomatic personnel, the State Department, and everything. He had been invited. Let's clarify, too. So the Tehran conference wasn't put in Tehran because it had anything to do with Iran whatsoever. No, it didn't.

59:40 It was chosen because the big three, Churchill and FDR and Stalin, could agree on that location. Stalin was the big person who insisted that it be in Tehran. Because he didn't want to travel very far. He didn't want to travel very far. He was always worried about his status. Right. So Tehran was chosen for that reason, not because of anything having to do with Iran. No. So this idea that if you're the Shah, you're going to do a reciprocal visit to Washington. Well, it's not reciprocal for anything because they didn't come to Tehran to honor Iran or honor him. meet with him as a head of state or anything else. They went there because it was convenient for them to hold up. You know, it was like that was where they decided to have their conference. Yes. Not that it had anything to do with Iran itself. But even today, if you have a conference or meeting, a high level meeting with a foreign dignitary, say in the United States. you would involve the host country in this in some fashion.

1:00:31 There was no involvement by the host country at all in this meeting. And it really had nothing to do with Iran. So they weren't even treated as hosts? They weren't even treated as hosts. And I mean, Roosevelt was just like, sure, if I must do this, sure, I'll do this. But Roosevelt's not really thinking of the Shah as a coming force. I mean, if anything, Roosevelt would be probably more inclined to support the reform element that wanted to see parliament become like the leading authority in Iran. That would be kind of more along his lines for what he was looking at. He really wanted this. The Shah really wanted this.

1:01:16 This visit to the United States. And it kind of took a while for it to happen. It took a lot of involvement to the point where The president was not Roosevelt, but it was Truman that he actually visited. So Roosevelt died in April of 1945. Yes. And Truman succeeded him. Yes. And it was not until 1949, after Truman was reelected, that the Shah was going to make his visit to the United States. And again, he is on a charm offensive with the United States because he sees. problems with the relationship with the british and big problems in his relationship with the soviet union so he needs a counterbalance but we're getting ahead of ourselves aren't we yes in the teheran conference nothing about that conference really had to do with iran even though it was held there except that there was one thing that did come out of it according to my research which is that the the soviet union the british and the united states did agree that Iran's sovereignty would be, what are the right words, restored and respected after the end of World War II, whenever that was going to be. Yes. And that everybody would pull out of Iran six months after the war ended. And that didn't just mean the war with Germany. It meant the war with Japan as well. Now, Japan surrendered officially on the battleship Missouri on September 2nd, 1945.

1:02:44 So six months later was March 2nd, 1946. That wound up being the deadline. to get out. And then there's a story to that as well. But the point I just want to make is they didn't really do much for Iran at the Tehran conference. They weren't really very interested. There was one thing about Iran's future that did come out of the Tehran. We're not going to see Iran turn into some sort of imperial possession like we saw a lot of the Middle East become at the end of World War I. Or be divided up into a Soviet sphere. Yes. A communist Soviet sphere and a free world sphere or anything like that. So that seems like a concession worth getting. I mean, he got something for his country. Well, I don't know that he did. I don't know. That might have been just Roosevelt. Because I was going to say this. I mean, the three powers didn't give a damn what happened in Iran when they made this decision. They're looking at each other. Yeah.

1:03:34 And they're looking at the future, you know, the imperial chessboard. Maybe it's not quite fair to say imperial chessboard for the United States, but the future Cold War chessboard that's going to happen, right? They're looking at that and just saying, what's Iran's status going to be when this is done? In terms of our interests, the three of us, let's all agree to pull out six months after the war ends, and let's all agree that Iran will have territorial sovereignty. But they don't give a damn about Iran or the Shah or the Iranian people when they're making this decision. And I don't know how much, I mean, Mohammad Shah wasn't in the meetings. Nope. I don't know how much input. any Iranian had into the agenda at all. None, none. I'm sure that the Shah and Iranian people liked that outcome.

1:04:18 I'm sure they liked it, yes. But they had no say in it. Right, and no input in trying to get that as a discussion item in the meeting at all. Because again, I've been the broken record of this episode where I've been saying they were focused on beating Germany, and of course that's what really mattered, not what happened in Iran as far as they're concerned. But the other aspect of it is now the post -war world, again, Iran, as far as they were concerned, was a little... tiny unimportant player unless you were british for the oil except for the oil and then the soviets had their own issues about you know expanding their own their own territory further south and those kind of things we'll get to that shortly but but iran itself wasn't an issue or the iranian people now this changes When the Soviets start dragging their feet about leaving. And there is an interesting story about this, which I think has a lot of resonance about what Iran was and what it could be. So the war is officially over September 2nd, 1945. The Russians, the Soviets have until March 2nd, 1946 to get out. They missed the deadline. So there is a story. Truman tells that he basically threatened to send naval forces to the Persian Gulf, and this was the decisive factor in getting the Soviets to leave. Now, I'm just going to say this. Looked at what the United States order of battle looked like back then. Looked at what the range was for them to be able to strike at. They do not have precision

1:05:53 guided munitions on ships. furthest range that aircraft carriers could deliver effects against is about 200 nautical miles. The Russians are actually 500 nautical miles from the Persian Gulf. Truman tells a nice story, but it's not actually the real story that happened. Mike, do you want to take up the reality? I agree with you. I don't see what aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf would do to throw the Soviets out of Iran. I mean, they were a very powerful force, but you kind of have to be in an ocean, and you're exactly right. I mean, I suppose late -war carrier aircraft could maybe penetrate, you know, maybe 250 miles inland, something like that. Yeah, you're not going to drive the Soviets out of there with aircraft carriers. I mean, actually, what we told the Iranians to do was say, why don't you just go talk to the United Nations about this? We can't be bothered. Well, what did happen is that the Soviets were dragging their feet because they were trying to set up two communist pro -Soviet governments up in the northern occupation zone that the Soviets controlled.

1:07:01 The Azerbaijan people's government. also known as the Azerbaijan Democratic Party regime, and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, officially called the Republic of Mahabad, which was established in Mahabad, as you might expect. The Soviets gave those two places military and political backing. But what finally happened was, is the British and the U .S. placed a great deal of pressure on Stalin to stop supporting these republics and pull out of Iran. And Stalin finally agreed. But the agreement he made was that he would pull out if the Iranians agreed to give the Soviet Union 51 % interest in an oil company, which would operate in the northern part of Iran, the part that the Soviets had been occupying. So the Iranians agreed to bring this before the modulus, the parliament. Stalin said okay, and the Soviets pulled out finally in May of 1946, which was two or three months, two and a half months, something like that, after the deadline.

1:08:03 It then went before the modulus. What do you think of this deal? And the modulus voted, I think it was 102 to 2 against the deal. The modulus said this was agreed to under duress. It's not valid. No, we don't agree to give the Soviet Union this. The Soviet Union was supposed to leave without this deal and voted overwhelmingly against it. And so that's how the Soviet Union wound up leaving and not getting the deal that it had wanted in exchange for leaving Iran under duress. And I honestly think that this kind of shows you. Iran does have the ability to run its own affairs here. They're actually using government institutions to kind of like help with this drive to get the Russians out of there.

1:08:54 And the prime minister is actually making the deal with the Russians. But I'm pretty sure the prime minister, if he was worth his salt, knew exactly how popular such a measure would be in the modulus. I suppose if they really wanted to, the Soviets could have just come back in. Ah, yes, but here's the problem at that point. They've left. So coming back into Iran would now be an invasion of Iran in a Cold War environment after the allies, including the Soviets, had agreed at the Tehran conference that Iran would maintain its territorial integrity. So if they were to move back in, they'd be invading Iran in violation of that agreement, and they'd create a huge, at a minimum, Cold War crisis with the West. But possibly they could have started, World War III by doing that, okay? I got you. So there was a strong incentive for them not to do it, and they didn't do it. I can see that. And also remember that they had suffered devastation during World War II. I mean, they were in no condition in May of 1946 to start a major war again with...

1:10:07 with the West. Maybe we didn't fully appreciate that at the time, but it was true. I mean, they suffered heavily during that war, and we're still recovering. So this was 46, and it wasn't until the 50s when they started doing stuff in Eastern Europe that was somewhat akin to, I don't know, I want to say an invasion, but... Like stuff in, I'm not good with Eastern European history, so stuff in like Czechoslovakia. 1968. Okay, that was much later on. And Hungary in 1956. Okay. Well, they came into Eastern Europe at the end of the war, obviously. They were occupying it. We were occupying Western Europe, right? They were in Eastern Europe. The idea that the West had was that, okay, now we've liberated these countries and they get to set their own governments up and decide their own future and what they wanted to do. And for a while in the late 40s, some of that kind of happened, but pretty much because the Soviet army was there, kind of the communists, the parties that were not communist parties were, you know, jailed, executed, not allowed to win elections and, you know. pretty quickly in the late 40s, everything became communist. And that's how you wound up with them all being satellite states of the Soviet Union. So they actually used, you know, back when they invaded Crimea, they kept saying, this is something new. This was not something new.

1:11:14 This is exactly how they would go in. They would subvert the actual government that existed. They would find minority disagreements, kind of like what they're doing in Donetsk right now. They have a playbook for this. And it goes back a lot further than most people realize. And the distrust already by early 1946 between the two sides. The World War II alliance was out the window and already they were eyeing each other. And we talked in the China series about how the Soviets also dragged their feet leaving Manchuria. And they waited until they could arm the Chinese communists, which then resulted eventually in the Chinese communists winning the civil war in China. So, I mean, the Russians were pulling these things all around the world, and the West already was not trusting them with anything by May of 1946 when this all happened. But in Iran at this point, what we're seeing is we're seeing a growing issue between... Who actually does rule the country? And this is the Shah and the Majlis. The Majlis does have a competitive opinion as far as their role versus the Shah. The Shah is the supreme autocrat, but they are the people's representatives as well as that could be at that time there. It's a constitutional monarchy, so the Shah does have some powers. Yes. But it is a constitutional monarchy, so the modulus has a lot of powers as well. Yes, it does. And there were certain power blocks that were forming that

1:12:46 would... specifically oppose the shah at this point so you have of course the communists are going to oppose that's the tuda party this party is never going to achieve a genuine popular following except among u .s officials who up until 1980 would still view it as this major threat and we have a pronunciation correction yes tuda tuda tuda party then we also have and this should not be surprising, the clerics in the modulus were also opposed to Shaw, and it would be a mistake to regard this group as monolithic, because there are... clerics that are opposed to the Shah because he's anti -democratic. There are clerics who are opposed to the Shah because he's too Western. He's violating values that are Iranian.

1:13:39 And then we also have the liberal wing, the one that was seeking to have the Shah more constitutional than monarch. The reform element that we saw during the Constitutional Convention, it still exists. They are urban reform elements, merchants, middle class professionals, students, intellectuals, who really want to see something, a parliamentary style of government, not unlike the government that the British have. And this is replete with irony. The Shah, in the meantime, is not looking to Britain. He's looking to the United States. And like I said, this was when he was able to kind of finally get this state visit that he had been wanting in 1949. He apparently went and stripped his mother's palace. of all the Persian antiquities that he could find, and he actually needed a new plane, a different plane, just to transport the gifts that he was bringing to the Americans. Truman got like a desk, 19th century desk. Mrs. Truman, Bess Truman, and Margaret Truman, their daughter, they got rugs from Isfahan that were like... 18th century. So Sharon, you have a collection of rugs. You can well imagine what sort of value we're talking about even in the 40s for something like that. I love my rugs.

1:15:09 As we are talking about all these place names in Iran, I was just saying I have my Isfahan, I have my Tabriz, I have my Nain, I have a Koum. You have a Koum, yes. And back then, presidents understood they couldn't keep this stuff. Yes. That appears to have been lost lately. It was understood back then. It was a gift to the United States, not to the president. You can feature it in your library. You can put it on display as a museum exhibit, but Truman never would have this in his house and be writing letters with the desk there. Because it belongs to the United States. It belongs to the United States and the museum there. Marshall, a little bit of context, too. I think we should also, as we close out the World War II era here in Iran, it should be noted that Sharon's pointed out that certainly the American record in Iran wasn't perfect. We kind of blundered around. We didn't necessarily do the best thing at all times. Nonetheless, we were the ones that came out of it with the best reputation among Iranians. Which is why the Shah is making his charm offensive. And not only the Shah, but also down to common people as well. There was some resentment over all these doggone foreigners being in our country. That happens anywhere. There was some issue about too much inflation because of too much American spending. And too much British spending. Too much British spending. There was, you know, there's always when you have a bunch of people somewhere, there's always going to be some altercations between, you know, the American soldiers and the locals and things, you know. So some of that came out of it. But overall, we came out with a very, very good reputation, especially compared

1:16:39 to the British and the Soviets, which were viewed as still viewed as predatory powers. We were not viewed as colonizers. We were not viewed as colonizers. And we'd actually been, to some extent, helpful to them. during World War II. And even before. Their problems weren't our focus, but nonetheless, we did actually try to feed them when we finally figured out what was going on with the food shortage and such. The other countries did not try to feed them. So we came out with a good reputation at this point. I think it's important to lay that down as a marker in terms of what the relations were between the two countries at the time the Shah is doing this. I mean, we are still not... We're still not, we the United States, we're still not prioritizing Iran as a major element of our foreign policy.

1:17:21 We're focused on Russia, Soviet Union, Cold War. Europe is where we're really focused and maybe to a lesser extent Japan and China. But we are not focused on the Middle East at all. You know, there is some interest in Saudi Arabia. which is probably why Roosevelt stopped on his way back to pay a visit on King Ibn Saud, the head of the country. And really not China, by the way. And if you want to know more about that, listen to our China series, Tea, Drugs, and Eats. We talk about how actually not China even, but Japan and Korea were a big part of it. That's a whole different issue. I just want to mention that. But they're still more important than the Middle East or Iran is at this point. That's the point here. The Shah is taking this as a challenge, and he is really going, he's not just limiting himself to a single visit. He is actually really cultivating the U .S. diplomatic personnel that's there, and he is kind of... taking advantage of the fact that he was educated in Switzerland.

1:18:32 He was very Western in his approach. These guys are going to find it appealing to be invited to the Shah's palace for a two -hour lunch once every two weeks. And he's going to basically dictate how we perceive Iran. And how we perceived Iran at this point is Iran did not need a Congress, a parliament. to run things. It needed a strong man with the backing of the army who could basically bring in order. And this is going to be time and time again, this is going to be kind of the perception that we're going to have of Iran in the future, at least at the official level. And people are going to, people who are assigned there, because our presence diplomatically is going to grow. Who could bring in order and keep out communism. Yes, and also be reliably anti -Soviet. Absolutely. It's going to be a huge running theme for the next couple of decades.

1:19:36 So as we're wrapping up the war years here, I want to draw attention to... a 70 -year -old charismatic leader in the Majlis. He is leading the opposition, a very peaceful opposition, that whenever the Shah is doing something, he's having demonstrations in public. This is Mohamed Mosadeh, of course. He is renowned for his integrity, and it's kind of telling that when he was an official and his mother was tardy about paying her taxes, he actually imposed fines on his own mom for this. This is a certain level of integrity that you do not find within the Iranian government. The Iranian government is corrupt as hell at this period. Probably this is something that's worth stating. And here you have someone who is... has this level of integrity. Significantly, Mossadegh was opposed to the Shah's drift towards autocracy. He opposed the election fraud, which the Shah was using to kind of pack the Majlis with his own people. So Mossadegh is a nationalist.

1:20:42 And this is something that the British and the Americans eventually would have a hard time distinguishing from, say, a communist or something that posed a threat to the stability within Iran. They would tend to view him through the prison of monolithic communism and the Cold War, British and the Americans. So we're going to get into the very many twists and turns of what all this meant for the United States and Iran in our next episode. That's it for this episode of the United States of Amnesia. Thank you for listening. We thank Sharon Bybee for joining us again today. Remember to check out her sub stack, Redacted No More. We have a link to it in the blog section of our website at usofamnesia .com and we'll add a link to the show notes for the episode too. We hope you learned something and we hope you discovered new ways of looking at things you had already heard or thought about. or perhaps hadn't heard about.

1:21:44 If you enjoyed it, that's great. If we made you mad, that's okay too. Either way, email us at usa .amnesia at gmail .com and let us know what you think. Also, let us know about anything you think we missed or got wrong. We'd like to know about that too. And of course, please like and subscribe and let your friends and neighbors know about us. We also have a website. It's www .usofamnesia .com For Marshall, Mike, and myself, Blake Hinckley. Till next time.