An Interview with Bill James, America’s Foremost Iranian Expert

An Interview with Bill James, America’s Foremost Iranian Expert

In this second of a now five-part series (originally I planned on a four-part series) I take a closer look at the tragedy of American-Iranian relations. In this two-part interview I sit down with America’s foremost Iranian expert, Professor Bill James. In this first part, we talk about the Khomeini revolution, Israel and the scandals known as the October Surprise and Iran-Contra. The second part of my interview with Professor James will appear next week at this time in this space.

Q: Let’s begin with the downfall of American-Iranian relations. Was there a specific incident, a moment in time?

James: One moment? There were many, Brian. But to answer your question I would say October 22, 1979. Gravely ill, the deposed Shah of Iran entered the United States on a visa signed by Jimmy Carter. Instantaneously the revolution in Iran shifted. Khomeini had his next enemy and he needed one. His revolution was teetering. The United States of America became the Satan. You heard it on the streets everyday: Marg bar Amreeka. Death to America. Carter made a terrible, terrible mistake in signing that visa. And we still feel the aftershocks here in the 21st century.

Q: What options were open to Carter?

James: Well that’s the question. The Shah needed urgent medical care. The facilities in Mexico, where he’d been prior to New York, were substandard. Carter, and the entire literature of his presidency supports this, did not want to open America to the Shah. For months he put it off. The Carter administration even considered sending the necessary medical equipment and personnel to Mexico. The cost, though, was exorbitant. In the millions.
     Meanwhile, the pressure mounted from all sides. Carter’s Cabinet, led by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and eventually joined by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, implored Carter to give the Shah a visa. Henry Kissinger, then an extremely powerful voice, was on every morning news show arguing that the Shah had been our ally and as such he deserved our friendship. David Rockefeller, the head of Chase Manhattan and with some serious financial stake in Iran, made a personal plea to Carter on behalf of the Shah. John McCloy, one of the so-called wise men and a lackey of Rockefeller’s, bombarded the White House with petitions. Finally, Jimmy Carter signed the visa. But it was against his own better judgment.

(History supports Bill James’s conclusion. Upon signing the Shah’s visa, President Carter asked his advisors a rather prescient question, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” Student-militants overran the embassy some two weeks later. The hostage crisis lasted 444 days.)

James: If the United States hadn’t opened its borders to the Shah, the entire trajectory of the Iranian revolution would have imploded in on itself. Listen, the mullahs wanted a monarchy. They didn’t necessarily want the Khomeini way. They just didn’t want the Shah. In fact a rumor swept over Iran in 1979. The mullahs wanted to put Reza on the throne.

Q: Reza, the eldest son of the Shah?

James: Yes. And I’ll tell you a personal story. In 1979 I was a professor at Williams College in western Massachusetts. That fall term, Reza Pahlavi enrolled in my course on Persian history – up to the Islamic invasion (AD 637), if memory serves. He sat in the back of my class. Quiet, shy, demure – you know, that’s what they said about his father. That he was the shiest dictator in power. But for me it was wild to look into the eyes of Reza and to realize that he could have been the Shahanshah (Persian for King of Kings). On a side note, Reza came to class without bodyguards. Meanwhile there was an exorbitant bounty on his father’s head. I remember thinking, “What if there’s an ambush during class?”

Q: What would Reza Pahlavi have done, had he been asked by the mullahs of Iran to replace his father?

James: He would have jumped at the chance. Listen, in 1941, a similar ascendancy took place. The British together with the Soviets removed the Shah’s father because he’d formed a bit of a love affair with the Nazis. The Allies installed the son as the new monarch, with his father’s blessing. The Shah was 22-years-old. You don’t think the same kind of deal would have been made again? Of course it would have, with the father’s blessing.

Q: How old was Reza in 1979?

James: 19.

Q: That’s a little young to be monarch, don’t you think?

James: Ruhollah Khomeini was 77 when he took over. Isn’t that a little old to run a country?

Q: John McCain might argue with that.

James: And Ronald Reagan.

Q; Yes, and Ronald Reagan. Speaking of Reagan, I recently read the autobiography of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of Khomeini’s Iran. He stated of Khomeini, and I quote, “We told him what to say and he memorized it and recited it verbatim. He was unsure of himself, which is why he repeated whatever he was told. Khomeini was scripted. Just like Ronald Reagan.” How do you respond to that?

James: I’ll respond in two ways. First, the question has to be asked: How credible a source was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr? In my opinion, he was as sleazy and as mendacious as James Frey – and his memoir is A Million Little Pieces, Iranian-style. I think you have to take Bani-Sadr with a grain of salt. Listen to what he has to say. Just remember that the man perpetuates a legend of great self-aggrandizement.
     As for Khomeini, in America we believe that the Iranians loved their Khomeini across the board. In fact, the Iranian point of view came with a great deal of nuance. The mullah population, for instance, distrusted Khomeini. The Ayatollah certainly had a scholar’s aptitude. He was the author of seventeen books on Islamic themes, some with multiple volumes. But Khomeini was also a political theologian and that’s where he got himself into trouble with the mullah population. He was too much of a firebrand, too much of an agitator. In the process of his political development, Khomeini had compromised his commitment to Sharia (Islamic law) – at least this was the view within the mullah set.
     Meanwhile, the politicians underestimated Khomeini, just like Reagan. Khomeini’s greatest attribute was his charisma and he charmed millions. So even those who distrusted him, or didn’t quite take to him, went along with the Khomeini revolution. Again, in the beginning the aim was to rid Iran of the Shah. Just like in 1980, the aim here in the States was to rid the White House of Carter. I’ll say this, a psychologist would have a heyday comparing the psyches of Khomeini and Reagan.

Q: You are the author of the only biography on Khomeini written by an American scholar, The Eyes of Islam: A Political Biography of Ruhollah Khomeini. Can you talk a little bit about Khomeini in human terms? In America, we think of the man as a nutcase, a monster. There has to be the flip side, the compassionate side.

James: Absolutely. Khomeini was a man of many complexities. In that he differed from Reagan, who was a man of many simplicities. Do you remember all the hair gel that Reagan used? Well, Khomeini too engaged in foppery. Every morning as part of his washing ritual he spent a good deal of time grooming his beard. Ruhollah Khomeini was a Paco Rabanne man. He perfumed with pour homme.

(Momentarily, Bill James went silent. He stared at the clutter on his desk. Students’ papers, articles, notes, files – the typical gray matter of a professor’s existence. Suddenly he slapped his leg. This I came to realize was Bill James’s way of regaining his line of thought.)

James: Khomeini took his name from his hometown, a desolate place on the edge of the Iranian Desert. Khomeini only knew pain there: a murdered father, a mother too overburdened with children to care for the young Ruhollah, unkind relatives serving as caretakers. It’s no wonder that Khomeini became an ascetic. He only had himself from an early age.
     The town of Khomein, some 200 miles south of Tehran, resembled an end-of-the-line outpost. The map of Iran is dotted, or littered, with these types of places. We’re talking dark towns, without electricity. We’re talking smelly outposts. No sewage system. The waste just kind of coagulates on the side of the road. There’s a mosque and a religious leader old enough to remember the country before the Shah. These towns are dusty, ornery, self-governing. This is the backbone of Iran.

Q: Sounds a little like towns in the Wild West.

James: Well, I’m no expert on the Wild West, but it seems to me that there was vibrancy about the Wild West, vitality. Think about it: Settlers traveled overland to get out there. They traveled to those places. Those places were destinations, despite what was known about them – the incredible difficulty, the abject cruelty, the lawlessness. In Iran, no settlers traveled to towns like Khomein. Nobody came and few departed. There’s no romance to these towns. They were quiet places, lonely places, extremely poor places, extremely uneducated places. It says a great deal about modern Iran that its spiritual leader was born and raised in a place like Khomein. It says that Iran, when push comes to shove, reverts back to a dark ages kind of mentality. Consider the flipside. Can you imagine an American leader coming from a place like that?

Q: Richard Nixon.

James: Richard Nixon? Brian, Whittier is in California, the land of plenty. Whittier ain’t no Khomein.

(A quick note: Despite his claim, Bill James does have some expertise in the Wild West. He researched and wrote a book on a famous ancestor, Jesse James. In the Footsteps of an Outlaw: A Relative Traces the Life and Times of Jesse James, Bill James recreates the Wild West in all of its lively and troubled ways.)

Q: Did you ever interview Khomeini?

James: Yes, but earlier in his life, before he became the spiritual leader of his country. I’ll tell you a story. There used to be great debates between Orthodox rabbis and Shiite clerics. This was back in the late 60, early 70s. Khomeini was in exile then and he would travel to Turkey. I was a young Iranian scholar then. Well, not really a scholar. I was learning. Anyway, I went to Turkey to interview Ruhollah Khomeini. I found him fascinating. From this time, in fact, I began to fashion a biography of Khomeini in my mind. He had a remarkable relationship with a Jew named Amram Blau.

Q: Who was Amram Blau?

James: Rabbi Amram Blau led a small sect of Orthodox Jews called Neturei Karta. Perhaps you’ve heard of the group? This is the anti-Zionist sect with strange bedfellows. In the past Neturei Karta has funded the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat, marched with Hamas in anti-Israel rallies, and proudly participated in President Ahmadinejad’s conference on the denial of the Holocaust.
     As you might imagine, Khomeini, with his similar beliefs, and Amram Blau built up quite a friendship. Also, there was a woman, Ruth Ben-David, the wife of Blau. Khomeini was absolutely fascinated by her and a unique connection developed. Both had magnetic personalities. Both were vigorous scholars. Both were world-class debaters. She was his intellectual rival, which was unheard of in the Muslim world. For the first time in his life Khomeini enjoyed the intellectualism of a female. They both shared the same sort of orthodoxy, the same commitment to austerity.
     The question has to be asked: Was there ever any hanky-panky? Both Ben-David and Khomeini adored their spouses, but still, their connection was one of those once-in-a-lifetimes.

Q: How many wives did Khomeini have?

James: One. Her name was Batul. Ayatollah Khomeini felt a total devotion to his wife. He could have supplemented Batul with additional wives under Islamic law. He didn’t. His eyes said it all. He constantly watched her. In the eyes of the world, he was a lion, menacing, sinister. The West thought he was staring them down. In Iran, Khomeini’s eyes were thought to be submissive, dedicated. The eyes of wooing his favorite lady.

(Bill James took a moment to stare at the poster on the wall. In the poster, a headshot of Ayatollah Khomeini, the grim, black eyes seemed to shout, “Allaahu Akbar. Marg bar Amreeka. Marg bar Shah.” God is great. Death to America. Death to the Shah. Suddenly, Bill James slapped his leg.)

Q: What happened to the friendship between Khomeini and Amram Blau and his wife?

James: Khomeini became the spiritual leader of Iran. He couldn’t maintain a friendship with Jews. Amram Blau and his wife were ex-communicated from Neturei Karta. She was a convert to Judaism and that just didn’t play within the group. Blau died in 1974. I don’t know what happened to Ruth Ben-David.

Q: Since we’re talking about Khomeini’s personal relationship with Jews, let’s talk about Iran’s relationship with Israel. On the surface, Khomeini was constantly calling for the End of Days for the Jewish state. Below the surface, he ordered his envoys to not only negotiate with the Israelis but to create a triangular trade with America.

James: Correct. First, realize that the Iranian military relied on American parts and technology, purchased during the reign of the Shah. Second, realize that Israel had warehouses stocked with American-made equipment. The only other country that held a stockpile of American military parts was Vietnam. Remember, under the administrations of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, America sent a vast array of military hardware to South Vietnam. All of that equipment fell into the hands of the victors. Most of that equipment, however, was made in the late 60s.
     Now, after the Shah fled, Iran’s military went into a state of total degeneration. For instance, in the autumn of 1980, Iran’s military was only 25 percent operational. Along the long border with Iraq, Iran had just 120 tanks and two divisions of soldiers. If ever Iran was ripe for an invasion, this was the time. Enter Saddam Hussein, the sworn enemy of Ayatollah Khomeini.
     Furthermore, Iran’s pilots were all in prison. Khomeini dismantled the Iranian Air Force when he came to power. Many of the most skilled fighter pilots were Shah loyalists and Khomeini had locked these men in Evin prison. There were plans to assassinate them. When Iraq invaded in September 1980, Khomeini freed his fighter pilots. And they saved Iran. They engaged the Iraqis in the sky and won the majority of the battles, mainly because they had superior, American-made equipment. It’s a remarkable story, from death row to rescuing the nation literally overnight. Those fighter pilots gave Iran a nationalistic shot in the arm.

Q: So Iran turned to Israel?

James: Indeed. A couple of examples. In the spring of 1980, Israeli Military Intelligence agreed to sell the Iranians military hardware, beginning with spare parts for their F-4s. The Israelis sold Iran 300 tires at $900 each, an exorbitant price, something like $400 profit per tire.
     Subsequently, a Greek ship named the Dionysus began delivering arms from the Israeli port of Eilat to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The ship was owned by an Iranian arms merchant named Jamshid Hashemi, who would play significant roles in both the October Surprise affair and Iran-Contra. Over a period of weeks, Israel sent Iran American-made ammunition for tanks and guns. The price tag was in the hundreds of millions. And this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Q: What was in it for the Israelis? Profit, obviously, but anything else?

James: The Israelis had a form of diplomacy called the Doctrine of the Periphery. The doctrine sought allies among the outer edge of the Middle East. Since every Israeli neighbor wanted to rid the map of the Israeli nation, Israel reached out to the states of Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran. The Israelis had a long and rewarding relationship with the Shah. Without the Shah’s oil, for instance, Israel would have collapsed. When Khomeini came to power, the Israelis forged ahead with the doctrine. The Israelis feared Saddam Hussein more than Ayatollah Khomeini.

Q: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

James: Exactly. I’ll give you another example. You remember the hit at Osirak, when Israel took out Saddam’s nuclear generator? Two years before that event, the Israelis provided Khomeini with all of their schematics on the plant. On September 30, 1980, a week after Iraq invaded Iran, Iranian F-4 fighter-bombers attacked Osirak. The mission was not successful. But that’s beside the point. The point is, Israel supplied Iran.

Q: You mentioned both the October Surprise and Iran-Contra. First, can you give just a brief description of those ventures? And second, in America, investigative reporters have irrefutably detailed the deal known as Iran-Contra. The jury is still out on the October Surprise. What does the Iranian side show?

James: Iran-Contra actually shared much in common with the October Surprise. Hostages in the Middle East. An arms-for-hostages deal. The military equipment to aid an army fighting a war. In the case of the October Surprise, the military equipment went to the Iranian army fighting the Iraqis. In the case of Iran-Contra, the military equipment went to the Contras of Nicaragua, Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” Iran-Contra sure looked like an extension and confirmation of the October Surprise.
     I don’t have any inside information of either of those scandals but I’ll tell you how wide open the whole thing was in Iran, and I’m talking now about Iran-Contra. In May 1986 an American delegation flew into Tehran to negotiate an arms-for-hostages swap. The delegation stayed at the former Hilton Hotel, now called the Esteghlal, or the Independence.
     The mission of the delegation remained a secret in America for some time. In Iran, everyone knew basically from the time the delegation touched down at Mehrabad Airport. Five men comprised the delegation. They were: Robert McFarlane (Reagan’s national security adviser) and his assistant Howard Teicher, Oliver North (the point man on Iran-Contra), and George Cave (CIA’s expert on Iran). The fifth man was Amiram Nir, an Israeli traveling with American papers and the American family name of Miller. Ami Miller.
     To celebrate the delegation’s stay, the Tehran Hilton renamed their best five suites after these men.
     Meanwhile, there was a supreme law in Iran. Communication with the Americans, or the Israelis for that matter, was a treasonable offense. Punishable by death.

Q: Incredible.

James: Yes, and I’ll tell you something even more incredible. You should see the view from the Ollie North suite in the former Hilton Hotel. It has a bird’s eye view of Mount Damavand to the north. The snow glistening off the peak is just beautiful.

Q: One last question on Khomeini before moving on to more modern times. One of his stated goals was to export his revolution to the larger Middle East region. Why didn’t the Khomeini revolution take elsewhere?

James: From the bottom up perspective, the deep division between Sunni and Shia Islam would never allow for the Khomeini revolution to take in the heavy Sunni populations. We’re talking about a division as strong as the Jews and the Catholics during the Holocaust. From the top down perspective, the leaders in the Arab world saw the Khomeini revolution as both geopolitically grave and personally threatening. If the Iranian population could rise up and overthrow the Shah in favor of someone as dark as Khomeini, couldn’t the same happen elsewhere in the Middle East? Consider a place like Jordan. King Hussein had an unruly Palestinian minority. Taking the Khomeini revolution as an example, what was to stop that minority from rising up? When the Shah fell in 1979, an echo was sent across the kingdoms and dictatorships of the Middle East. “You are vulnerable!” the echo shouted.   The leaders of the Middle East not only cracked down on their own populations but they tried to further destabilize Iran. The only country in the Middle East that wanted to stabilize Iran was Israel. To the Israelis, Iraq, not Iran, was the bigger threat.

Bill James has spent the last forty years specializing in Iran and the extended Middle East. He holds a B.A. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Baylor University. He is the John Bard Professor of History at Bard College. Below is a list of his books. All of them, with the exception of the last, are available for purchase:

James, Bill. The Lion and the Eagle: the Heartbreak of American-Iranian Relations.
     Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
---–. The Hope of Ghotbzadeh. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
–––. The Eyes of Islam: A Political Biography of Ruhollah Khomeini. New York:
     HarperCollins, 1994.
–––. In the Footsteps of an Outlaw: A Relative Traces the Life and Times of Jesse James.
     Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
–––. Fahd the Fanaan: A Biography of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. New York: Simon
     and Schuster, 2010.

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An Interview with Bill James, America’s Foremost Iranian Expert