IRAN-CONTRA: STILL A MYSTERY. Part 7: Did Jimmy Carter remove the Shah and install Khomeini?
An MOR series
If you didn’t read Part 6 yet, you may do so here:
Journalistic, academic, and congressional investigations have established that Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. secretly sent billions of dollars’ worth of US weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of modern Iranian jihadism (see earlier chapters of this Iran-Contra series).
But that’s not where it all began—Jimmy Carter’s story remains to be told. The evidence, thanks to recently declassified documents, is now overwhelming and establishes what many at the time suspected: that Carter quite deliberately removed the Shah of Iran and just as deliberately installed Ayatollah Khomeini in power.
In this final chapter of MOR’s Iran-Contra series, I present and discuss Carter’s chess moves to complete the demonstration that the Republican Iran-Contra Affair was but the continuation of Democrat Jimmy Carter’s pro-jihadi policies.
Since Iran-Contra, I argue, US policy has been continuously bipartisan and continuously pro-jihadi—a pattern that, once recognized, holds the key to a proper understanding of Donald Trump’s current war on the Iranian jihadis.
As we saw in Part 5, Jimmy Carter ran for president on a platform projecting him as a ‘regular guy’ and a ‘good guy.’ A good Christian: someone to bring ethical leadership to both domestic and foreign policy.
Coinciding nicely with this change in public discourse, just two months before Carter assumed the presidency the famous human-rights NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) Amnesty International began its media saturation campaign accusing the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of widespread abuses against Iranians. An ethical president had to do something about that (became the media implication).
But were the accusations really non-governmental?
Not according to the founder of that ‘non-governmental organization,’ who, as you will recall from Part 6, publicly claimed that Amnesty International—right after the founding—had been infiltrated and turned into a CIA and MI6 front.
As we also saw in Part 6:
the same CIA and MI6 had collaborated in the 1953 ‘coup’ that gave Shah Reza Pahlavi autocratic power in Iran;
recently declassified documents establish that the CIA likewise “had extensive contact with Ayatollah Khomeini,” the Shah’s replacement, “before [the] Iran revolution”; and
right before Khomeini was to assume power, Jimmy Carter gave the recalcitrant Shah of Iran a final and frank command to give up his throne (the Shah obeyed).
The foregoing justifies the following hypothesis: perhaps a covertly controlled human-rights ‘NGO’ and a covertly controlled media apparatus (see Part 4 of this series) managed our reality to create the image of a ‘monstrous’ Shah, so that Westerners would cheer for the monarch’s removal, thereby allowing the CIA spooks to replace him with their new asset, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a masterstroke of cleverness, Khomeini would perform the part of an enemy.
Stated briefly, the question is this:
Did Jimmy Carter imperially remove the Shah to install Khomeini?
My answer is yes, and I will provide what I consider the definitive evidence below: Jimmy Carter’s maneuverings—he moved Heaven and Earth—to make the Iranian military stand down so that Khomeini could take power.
MOR’s Machiavellian model thus makes the following claim:
MOR claim: The US bosses deliberately launched the modern World Jihad from Iran.
We have further argued that, following the Carter-Reagan-Bush pro-jihadi maneuvers, the US bosses have pursued a consistent pro-jihadi policy for half a century.
It now appears to many, however, that Donald Trump’s present war on the Iranian ayatollahs is reversing this tradition.
Is it?
But if we say Trump is anti-jihad and pro-Israel, a theoretical problem immediately arises, because Trump has protected the Iranian axis of the ayatollahs in Lebanon and Gaza. And Trump even saved the ayatollahs themselves in the Twelve Day War.
Moreover, Trump has made other pro-jihad—and anti-Israel—moves. He is protecting Qatar, a Sharia slave State that has been a major sponsor of jihadism, and in particular of Hamas, making it the intellectual author of the October 7 anti-Israeli massacre and hostage-taking. And Trump installed an ISIS commander—Muhammad Al Jolani (Ahmed Al Sharaa)—as the new government of Syria. ISIS are—with Hamas—the most sadistic jihadi terrorists in the world.
If your favorite model is that the US bosses have an anti-jihad and pro-Israel policy, fine: you can put that on the table. But shoulder your theoretical burden: you must explain how specific US policies that protect or promote the jihadis and weaken Israeli security are consistent with your model. For example, you must explain why the dollar value of US armament transferred to jihadis is so much larger than what the US transfers to Israel.
![DOES THE US SUPPORT ISRAEL? OR JIHAD? A simple-minded look at the numbers [PART 2]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9ly4!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62400654-407c-4bbe-ad1d-6a595abb82a0_1701x1077.png)
Conversely, since our model is that the US bosses are pro-jihad and anti-Israel, we must explain why Donald Trump has now attacked the ayatollahs. In this respect, US policy toward ISIS may perhaps give us our most important clue.
That’s because the US bosses themselves created ISIS.
And then the US bosses attacked ISIS—Donald Trump himself defeated them. But Trump saved a remnant—Al Jolani’s forces—which he has now installed as the government of Syria!
Is Trump’s present war on the Iranian ayatollahs repeating this pattern?
Some aspects have already repeated, because the ayatollah regime that Trump is now attacking was earlier—as in the case of ISIS—created by the US bosses, as we argue below. If the functional consequence also repeats, then Trump will end up strengthening jihadism against Israel. For that is what his war on ISIS did: it gave the Iranian ayatollahs—much more dangerous to Israel than ISIS—a land corridor to the northern border of Israel, as we explain here:
The war on ISIS may have looked superficially like a war on jihadism and a benefit to Israel, but in fact it increased the jihadi threat to Israel.
To make the full case that a similar game is now afoot requires me to acquaint you with the facts of how the US bosses brought the jihadi Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power in Iran and then immediately furnished him with all manner of secretly transferred weapons.
We recommend starting with Part 1 for a better understanding of the Reagan-Bush secret weapons transfers to Khomeini:
As for Jimmy Carter’s role in getting Khomeini installed as Supreme Leader in Iran, which is mostly unknown and almost universally misunderstood, all that remains in this series is to document his specific maneuverings. I will do that below.
If I have done my job right, you will agree with me that Ronald Reagan was not the anti-Carter he pretended to be, but rather the faithful continuator of Carter’s policies in the Middle East—policies that then continued in a pro-jihad and anti-Israel direction for a half century, up to and including Donald Trump.
All of that needs to be explained, not just the last two weeks of Donald Trump’s war against the ayatollahs. Accordingly, in closing, I will argue that it is far easier for the pro-jihad and anti-Israel model to make sense of Trump’s present war on the ayatollahs, than it is for the anti-jihad and pro-Israel model to make sense of the last fifty years.
Jimmy Carter, the CIA, and the arming and training of Khomeini’s guerrillas
In the 1970s, PLO/Fatah—the Arab Palestinian terrorist group now better known as the ‘Palestinian Authority’—had a kind of ‘State within a State’ in southern Lebanon, which it used as a base for launching attacks against Israeli civilians. But they were doing other things, too. During this time, PLO/Fatah used its training camps in Lebanon to arm and train Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s guerrillas.1
In 1979, the year that Ayatollah Khomeini took power, this amazing fact—that PLO/Fatah occupied an ‘executive producer’ role in Khomeini’s revolution—was explained on the front page of the New York Times, as we document here:
But this amazing fact is now almost entirely forgotten.
Now, if I may interject a quick parenthesis: the US bosses have been very nice to PLO/Fatah. They have gone quite out of their way to engineer an entire ‘Oslo Peace Process’ to get PLO/Fatah partial sovereignty over militarily strategic territory of the Jewish State. Dramatic stuff. And it justifies the question: Is this a unified system? In other words, might not PLO/Fatah be an appendage of the US bosses—a fully owned tool that they deploy?
Any mind that meanders to such geopolitical speculations will be drawn, as if by irresistible temptation, to this question:
Were the US bosses involved with PLO/Fatah’s arming and training of Khomeini’s guerrillas?
What is known for a fact is that, during the precise time that PLO/Fatah was arming and training Ayatollah Khomeini’s guerrillas, the CIA’s relationship with PLO/Fatah in Lebanon became the most intimate geopolitical embrace—enough to make us all blush.
Mind you, Israeli diplomats had tried to prevent any kind of relationship from developing between US intelligence and PLO/Fatah, getting the US bosses to sign in 1975 an agreement that promised zero contact between the CIA and the Arab Palestinian terrorists. “In fact, however,” wrote the New York Times in 1981,
“the Central Intelligence Agency has for several years maintained and occasionally used a little publicized, so-called ‘back-channel’ line of communications with P.L.O. headquarters in Beirut [Lebanon].”2
Since this was published “several years” after the signature, the CIA apparently violated the agreement the minute it was signed. Or perhaps before? According to the Washington Post, in the year 1974—one year before signing that agreement with Israel—the CIA had already established a stable liaison with PLO/Fatah.3
Now, such contacts are tough to document because, as the New York Times also explained back then,
“The Central Intelligence Agency regularly employs private contractors. In recent years, the State Department has used private intermediaries with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Government having promised Israel not to deal officially with the P.L.O.”4
Clearly the promise to Israel meant nothing. The only effect was to make the CIA careful to cloak its communications with PLO/Fatah.
The New York Times says the CIA “occasionally used” the back-channel to the PLO, but you shouldn’t take that seriously. There was apparently so much work to be done that the private intermediaries were dropped. Vincent Cannistraro, a high-level CIA bureaucrat (and one heavily involved in the Contra aspect of Iran-Contra), let it slip in a 2001 PBS Frontline interview that the PLO/Fatah terrorists
“had been the protectors for the American diplomatic community in Beirut [Lebanon’s capital] ... There was liaison with the PLO, and the Americans were depending on them for their security.”5
The Washington Post confirms the claim:
“The liaison [with the CIA] deepened during the 1975-76 Lebanese civil war, when Arafat’s operatives provided security for American diplomats in West Beirut.”6
PLO/Fatah terrorists became the security team for the US State Department diplomats in Beirut! That’s not an “occasionally used … back-channel”; that’s full-frontal intimacy.
It has become accepted in the mainstream, in fact, that the CIA became deeply intertwined with PLO/Fatah during the 1970s, when the Arab terrorists controlled southern Lebanon. The CIA, writes the Washington Post,
“open[ed] a secret channel with the PLO’s chief of intelligence, a charismatic operative named Ali Hassan Salameh … [with] the explicit approval of Yasser Arafat himself … [and] Salameh came to be regarded within the CIA as a witting ‘asset’ … immensely valuable … Part of what motivated Salameh to work with the CIA was the belief that America could help the PLO win its political goals.”7
What were the CIA and PLO/Fatah working on so closely together in Lebanon? What were those “political goals” that PLO/Fatah thought the CIA might satisfy? Well, what was PLO/Fatah doing in Lebanon? Answer: They were getting Khomeini’s guerrillas ready for the Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Was the CIA helping with that?
It is undisputed that during this period the CIA was having “extensive contacts” with Khomeini—the same Khomeini whom PLO/Fatah’s efforts would soon crown as Supreme Leader of Iran (see Part 6). And it is undisputed that US president Jimmy Carter pressured Khomeini’s rival, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, to step down (see Part 6).
So the hypothesis one must consider and test is this:
Hypothesis: The CIA and PLO/Fatah were working together to launch World Jihad from Iran.
Let’s see if the rest of the context is consistent with this hypothesis.
Khomeini takes power
As the Shah finally obeyed Jimmy Carter’s peremptory order to leave Iran, Khomeini’s allies in Paris—where the terrorist cleric had been allowed by French authorities to live in exile—hurriedly chartered an Air France Boeing 747 so that Khomeini could fly (comfortably) to Iran with his entourage and become Iran’s new Supreme Leader (informally, at first, though soon he would be designated with that official title).
In the interim, Shahpur Bakhtiar, an opponent of the Shah, was chosen and approved by the Majlis (Parliament) to be the Iranian prime minister. He wouldn’t last long. When Khomeini arrived, invoking no particular authority other than his own assumed holiness, and demonstrating that he was already, de facto, the Supreme Leader, he appointed Mehdi Bazargan to be the new prime minister.
A shrewd choice. Khomeini had yet to secure his own power, so appointing Bazargan, a famous modernist and moderate democrat, would please the many supporters of the revolution who were not jihadi fanatics and wanted democracy. But this could fool only the pathologically gullible among them (which, granted, are never scarce), because Khomeini had actually been perfectly clear in the relevant press conference, where he stated:
“ ‘… through the guardianship [velayat] that I have from the holy lawgiver [Muhammad], I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler. And since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed. The nation must obey him. This is not an ordinary government; it is a government based on the shari’a. Opposing this government means opposing the shari’a of Islam and revolting against the shari’a, and revolt against the government of the shari’a has its punishment in our law ... it is a heavy punishment in Islamic jurisprudence. Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is blasphemy. …’ ”8
Bakhtiar insisted for a few days, still, that he was the prime minister, and he must have felt hopeful when the Imperial Guard, on his side, attacked Air Force bases around Tehran after some Air Force technicians on February 8 pledged their support to Khomeini. But Khomeini’s guerrillas—Khomeini’s PLO/Fatah-trained guerrillas—supported the technicians and the fighting spread.
“Throughout the city, police stations and army barracks were attacked by guerrilla organizations and revolutionary crowds. Arsenals were systematically looted.”9
Bakhtiar ordered martial law—with curfew—on the 10th. Ignore that, Khomeini told his followers, and he announced a jihad against army units that defied the revolutionaries. On the 11th, the Supreme Military Council, “ ‘to prevent further disorder and bloodshed, decided unanimously to declare itself neutral.’ ” Bakhtiar fled the country the same day.10
’Twas all over. ’Twas just beginning…
“Quickly and silently, top military and intelligence officers who have refused to cooperate with the new government are executed by unofficial assassination squads. In the cities, as in the towns and villages, many hundreds more are murdered by frenzied crowds. It is February 12, 1979, just hours after the Ayatollah Khomeini has proclaimed the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Washington, President Carter convenes a hurried news conference to tell the world, ‘I believe the people of Iran and the government will continue to be our friends.’ ”11
Notice the performance. ‘Ethical’ Jimmy Carter had supposedly been very preoccupied with alleged human-rights abuses in Iran committed by the Shah, but now that it was Khomeini committing such abuses, ‘ethical’ Jimmy Carter rushed to provide cover.
Before the year was out, with Bazargan now gone as well, Khomeini’s goons would take the entire US embassy hostage and would abandon all pretense of liberal democracy. Iran—Khomeini made very clear—would fight World Jihad and kill infidels everywhere.
Did Jimmy Carter hold the military back so that Khomeini could take power?
Now, amid all the amazing comings and goings of the Iranian Revolution, two facts concerning the behavior of the Iranian military—among the largest and best equipped in the world at the time—are stunning.
First, even though two whole weeks elapsed between the Shah leaving Iran and Khomeini’s return, the Iranian military did not seize power.
And then, when Khomeini returned, the Iranian military capitulated to him with lightning speed after very little fighting.
So here’s the question:
Did Jimmy Carter hold the military back so that Khomeini could take power?
The activities of William Sullivan, the US ambassador in Tehran, are part of the accepted historical record, and not in dispute.
“after the Shah’s departure … [Sullivan] played a role ‘to arrange some sort of accommodation between the armed forces and the leaders of the impending revolution.’ ”
Sullivan was also privy to
“ ‘several talks … between General Moghadam, the chief of SAVAK, and representatives of [Khomeini-ally] Mehdi Bazargan … [and] Bazargan himself.’ ”12
That’s all according to Sullivan’s own testimony. So we have this: the US ambassador worked hard to ensure that the Iranian military did not stop Khomeini from taking power.
But it hardly ends there.
In the critical days right before and right after Khomeini arrived in Iran, when Iran’s future still hung in the balance, Jimmy Carter hurriedly sent US Air Force General Robert E. Huyser to Tehran. Why Huyser? Because Huyser knew the Iranian generals well, as he had played a gigantic role building and shaping the Iranian Air Force.
According to Huyser’s own testimony,
“The Chief of the Air Force was my old friend General Amir Hossein Rabii … There was a very close bond between us, and he called himself my little brother. General Rabii … had received much of his training in the US Air Force. Since most of the officers in the Iranian Air Force were trained by the US and their equipment was nearly all American, and they used the English language to operate, Rabii was running something of a miniature US Air Force in his own country. His units were patterned on those of the US Air Force, and even their squadron buildings were of American design.”13
What was Huyser telling his “little brothers” in Iran to do? What was Carter’s message? Nobody knew. But, at that time, those prone to suspect foul play accused Carter of telling the Iranian generals, via Huyser, to stand down and let Khomeini take power.
William Safire, for example, made this very claim in a 1981 op-ed published in the New York Times, where he called for
“the equivalent of a British Royal Commission … to investigate and assess blame for the ill-starred Huyser mission that helped the [Iranian] terrorists come to power.”14
No such investigative commission was set up. But in 2016, as covered in Part 6, those of us interested in what happens in the dark got lucky: “a trove of newly declassified US government documents—diplomatic cables, policy memos, meeting records—” became available, and these “tell the largely unknown story of America’s secret engagement with Khomeini.” The BBC published the story, but out of the way in BBC Persian Service, which almost nobody reads.15
This should have been a front-page scandal all over the world.
Just as William Safire suspected, these documents have confirmed that “the Carter administration”—via the Huyser mission—“in effect paved the way for [Khomeini’s] return [to Iran] by holding the Iranian army back from launching a military coup.” And once Khomeini arrived, “the Iranian military, which was under US influence, soon surrendered.”16
The BBC insists on interpreting all this with another expression of the mainstream ‘innocence’ model:
“Carter … [committed a] massive blunder. The real danger was overlooked, Khomeini’s ambitions were underestimated, and his moves were misread. Unlike Carter, Khomeini … played his hand masterfully.”17 (emphases mine)
The mainstream model, notice, reduces the US government to ‘Carter.’ It is Carter’s “massive blunder.”
And so the mainstream—official—story becomes that Carter was somehow duped by Khomeini. The jihadi cleric tricked Carter into thinking that he was a religious saint in the Western sense: someone who wishes to do good. So Carter supported him, and hoisted him into power, because he never understood Khomeini. Carter: country bumpkin.
But doesn’t a president have bureaucracies? And don’t bureaucracies have experts? Don’t they have memory? Well, of course they do! And that goes double for intelligence bureaucracies, whose most important function (upon which all others depend) is to have a memory. And yet, no, the mainstream ‘innocence’ model requires you to imagine that each new government is some kind of blank slate. It’s just ‘Carter,’ you see, who kind of bumbled into the White House in a distracted haze and, like a child, made a “massive blunder,” while “Khomeini”—the evil, molesting adult—“played his hand masterfully.”
The second you shake your head and rip yourself away from this absurd hallucination you’ll remember that Khomeini had reached out to the US bosses, seeking an alliance, as far back as 1963 (Part 6). And Khomeini had done that, mind you, after demonstrating that he could whip up jihadi violence against the Shah.
It is obvious that Khomeini expected the CIA to be passionately interested in his jihadism. And it is a documented fact that the CIA was interested and cultivated a relationship with Khomeini. So what is the mainstream innocence model—in light of these facts—asking you to believe when it proposes that Khomeini somehow duped Carter? That the CIA—abruptly in 1979—forgot who and what Khomeini was, and what they themselves had been preparing him for until that very year!
That’s obvious nonsense.
MOR’s Machiavellian model, by contrast, requires no such nonsense. It agrees with these facts just as nicely as it agrees with the evidence of CIA-PLO/Fatah intimacy during the time in which PLO/Fatah armed and trained Khomeini’s fanatical jihadi guerrillas in Lebanon. Because MOR’s Machiavellian model says that the US bosses—consummate psychopaths—have been deliberately promoting jihadism in their efforts to destroy modern Western democracy, beginning with a genocide in the State of Israel. The US bosses are not idiots; their controlled media has to claim they are idiots because the alternative is that they are evil—and they don’t want you thinking that!
On the evidence, the mainstream ‘innocence’ model—especially against its competition, the MOR model—is looking fatally weak. Why prefer it? But if you really need a smoking gun before you can reject the mainstream model, I’ve got it.
It’s Hossein Fardoust.
Hossein Fardoust: the smoking gun
The key operator behind the scenes during the revolution—as before the revolution—was Hossein Fardoust.
As covered in Part 6, Fardoust was the Shah’s intimate friend and trusted companion from childhood. And with that trust he had become the Iranian eminence grise, the top consigliere, overseeing the entire government—including SAVAK. He was constantly testing the whole structure for loyalty to the Shah. He retained, moreover, a massive informal, personal influence within all of SAVAK, the Shah’s internal security service, where he’d recently been the chief of “SAVAK within SAVAK,” the Special Intelligence Bureau. If anybody could play kingmaker in Iran, it was Hossein Fardoust.
There is zero controversy over this point: Fardoust betrayed the Shah and helped Khomeini take power.
“Generals Fardoust and Gharabaghi were received by Khomeini on February 9 …, two days before the overthrow of the former regime. The meeting took place in the presence of Bazargan [whom Khomeini would soon name prime minister], Hojat-al-islam Eshraghi, and a few other clerics. On that occasion, they both [Fardoust and Gharabaghi] had signed an affidavit of support and allegiance to Khomeini and the ‘Islamic Revolution’ and promised to deliver ‘the surrender of other commanders of the armed forces.’ This is in fact what the two of them succeeded in doing. The Iranian army’s top brass on 10 February 1979 declared the army’s neutrality in the revolution. They withdrew their forces from the streets in all major cities, took them back into their barracks and bases, and left the country wide open for take over by the revolutionaries.”18 (emphases mine)
Who was Fardoust working for?
SAVAK—of which Fardoust had been formally, and was now de facto, the leader—was a CIA creature through and through. Recall how Huyser described above the Shah’s Iranian Air Force as a “miniature US Air Force” led by “General Amir Hossein Rabii … [who] called himself my little brother.” There was a similar relationship between the intelligence agencies: SAVAK was a miniature CIA—the CIA’s “little brother.”
From this context, it is anything but outlandish to suggest that the CIA controlled Fardoust. Especially when you factor in that Fardoust was doing the same thing that Carter’s other two prominent instruments—Robert Huyser and William Sullivan—were also doing: getting the Iranian generals to stand down and let Khomeini take power.
All of this supports the central claim of this series: that Khomeini was himself a US asset.
But here’s the clincher, the smoking gun: once in power, Khomeini absorbed Fardoust’s SAVAK.
That’s right! Khomeini’s internal security apparatus, named SAVAMA, though created ostensibly to ‘replace’ SAVAK, was mostly just SAVAK renamed. Not only was the ‘new’ SAVAMA run by the same Hossein Fardoust, but SAVAMA’s ranks were swelled by “ ‘large numbers of former SAVAK people.’ ”
It was Ali Tabatabai, “former press counselor at the [Shah’s] Iranian Embassy in Washington,” who explained this to the Washington Post. He said:
“ ‘In fact, with the exception of the bureau chiefs [who ran the individual sections of SAVAK] the whole organization seems to be intact.’ ” He called SAVAMA “ ‘almost a carbon copy [of SAVAK].’ ”19
Incidentally, Tabatabai was not forgiven for these revelations; shortly after this, he was murdered right outside his Maryland home. Somebody had to shut him up or everybody would soon understand that Khomeini’s intelligence service was still the CIA’s little bro.
At this point it will do us good to review what, in the MOR lingo, we call a dramatic—or diagnostic—fact:
DRAMATIC FACT: Something that has been indisputably documented but which your hypothesis requires to be impossible.
If you have a dramatic fact, then your hypothesis—at least as currently stated—must be discarded, because your hypothesis requires that ‘X,’ which already happened, is impossible.
Now watch.
It is the BBC’s contention that Jimmy Carter—allegedly a ‘good guy’—disagreed completely with Khomeini’s launching of World Jihad. That’s why they say that Carter committed a “massive blunder” and that Khomeini “played his hand masterfully,” thereby duping Carter. Khomeini, the BBC will have you believe, maliciously manipulated the CIA, which “underestimated,” says the BBC, “Khomeini’s ambitions.”
That’s the BBC’s ‘innocence’ model.
The most obvious problem—among many—for this model, is that, right after taking power, “Khomeini’s ambitions” were made perfectly and most publicly clear: World Jihad. And just in case anybody was confused about what that meant, Khomeini began taking hostages and arming terrorists. At which point everybody—even such fools as the BBC would have us believe are running the CIA—had to understand who and what Khomeini was.
If Carter and Khomeini were not ideologically or at least strategically aligned, as the BBC claims they weren’t, if Khomeini had duped Carter into supporting him, then the minute this deception became clear to Carter and his spooks the entire intelligence and security infrastructure built by ‘Great Satan’ in Iran would become fatally dangerous to Khomeini. The BBC’s model therefore requires that Khomeini’s absorption of SAVAK—basically intact—is impossible.
Impossible.
And yet that is precisely what happened: Khomeini simply grabbed SAVAK and renamed it SAVAMA (he even retained the CIA-tutored Hossein Fardoust to head it!).
We have a dramatic fact: the BBC’s model has been refuted. (If you’d like to understand better why the BBC produces such nonsense, we have an article that explains it.)
I expect resistance—some always wish to flog the dead horse. And because the ‘mistakes were made’ fountain is ever gushing, these resisters will cleverly come back at me with something like this: Hey, Francisco, but wait a minute. Even under the mainstream model, it is only impossible for Khomeini to absorb SAVAK if Khomeini cannot himself make a mistake.
Fine. But let’s be clear about what you are now saying, for this is no ordinary mistake. You are now saying that Khomeini did not understand that the intelligence and security infrastructure created in Iran by his greatest enemy, ‘Great Satan,’ whom he was publicly pledged to destroy, was a danger to him (especially after Khomeini fooled ‘Great Satan’). Your new claim—in service of saving the BBC’s mainstream model—requires that Khomeini suffered a severe cognitive impairment.
Yet the BBC’s model, as we saw, assumes that Khomeini was such a genius at politics and geopolitics that he “played his hand masterfully” and conned the CIA. So, after cleverly outsmarting the CIA, Khomeini then swallowed the CIA’s own assets in Iran. Khomeini was a great genius and also, simultaneously, a pathological idiot.
This is what they call ‘self-contradiction.’
Self-contradiction is what inevitably happens when the theorist tries to rescue an already refuted model: the desperate ad hoc moves do not save the model; instead, they create new and unsolvable logical and/or theoretical problems.
By the way, this is always how the critical-scientific thinking approach goes about testing a model: you assume it corresponds to the truth, and then you check to see whether it helps us explain the relevant evidence or, alternatively, whether it gets us into a logical and theoretical mess.
Now, how does MOR’s alternative—Machiavellian—model perform? Quite nicely. Khomeini absorbed SAVAK because he knew himself to be a CIA asset—and because the CIA wanted a front-row seat to Khomeini’s launch of World Jihad from Iran. The CIA and Khomeini were entirely aligned and satisfied with each other.
The MOR model also claims that the two major parties in the United States are irrelevant to understanding the creation and stability of policy, for it is the CIA that really governs the United States, as we have explained here:
The MOR (Management of Reality) model therefore has zero problem accounting for the fact that Democrat Jimmy Carter’s Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, continued Carter’s policies by secretly arming Khomeini to the teeth in the Iran-Contra Affair, despite representing himself on the campaign trail as Carter’s supposed opposite. Reagan’s ‘anti-jihadi’ performance—which we have analyzed in Part 1 of this series—was just more management of reality.
Every detail seems perfectly consistent with the Machiavellian model, the central claim of which is this: The true power, the CIA, are bad guys who want World Jihad and an anti-Jewish genocide.
But are the claims of the MOR model consistent with the larger context? Yes, they are.
The larger context: Jimmy Carter’s other policies
The demonstration above is already logically sufficient. But I know already that demonstrations need to be emotionally sufficient as well. In other words, ordinary mortals emotionally committed to some false mainstream version of reality will need more than what is logically sufficient to change their minds. They need to be overwhelmed.
The only effective method is overkill…
I must therefore multiply the exhibits of evidence that are easily consistent with the Machiavellian hypothesis, and for which the mainstream hypothesis needs to make crazier and crazier pseudo-logical acrobatics and special-pleading apologetics.
1. Central Command
Here’s one: Jimmy Carter created US Central Command—CENTCOM—explicitly to protect Khomeini.
“The origins of the Central Command,” explains the New York Times,
“go back to 1979 when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and his country was in turmoil as a result of the Islamic revolution…
To provide a military capability to back up President [Jimmy Carter’s] policy in the Gulf, [in 1980] a command designated the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which was to be a precursor of Centcom, was formed. Paul X. Kelley…[its] first commander … was told to draw up plans to defend Iran against a Soviet invasion…”20
The Shah of Iran had been an officially recognized client and ally of the government of the United States, whose entire system had been built by the United States, and from which the US bosses wanted to keep the Soviets out, yet the US bosses never built CENTCOM to protect the Shah from the Soviets. Nor did they build CENTCOM to topple Khomeini’s Iran, the supposed enemy, launcher of World Jihad. They built CENTCOM to protect Khomeini’s Iran.
2. The mujahideen
But that’s not all. Jimmy Carter also created the Afghan mujahideen, who helped spread World Jihad everywhere.
These Afghan mujahideen (or mujahedin) were presented to US citizens as a pro-liberty movement fighting to resist the Soviets, who were in Afghanistan to support the communist government there. What we now call the Taliban emerged from this—they were always jihadists. Given all this, the BBC—according to whom the last thing Carter or Reagan ever wanted was World Jihad—would have to call the US support for the mujahideen another “massive blunder.”
How massive?
Well, mujahid means “one who engages in jihad,” or in holy war against ‘infidels’ who must be killed, raped, and enslaved because they won’t ‘make islam’ (the meaning of ‘islam’ is ‘submission’). The mujahideen are the jihadis.
According to the BBC’s ‘innocence’ model, the CIA bosses indeed committed here a truly “massive blunder,” because it didn’t occur to them that a group calling itself “the jihadis” might be a group of jihadis.
So what happens if, to keep the ‘innocence’ model, you allow this move? That you get yourself into a huge theoretical problem: now you have to explain how such perfect idiots became the most powerful bosses in history.
The BBC does not have a reasonable model.
The Machiavellian model, by contrast, considers the US bosses to be political and geopolitical geniuses. Notice how this does zero violence to common sense: there is no theoretical difficulty in claiming that geopolitical geniuses became the most powerful people in all of history. To the contrary, that is precisely what you should reasonably expect.
In any case, regardless of how reasonable your theory may seem, what matters ultimately are the facts. And it is a documented fact that nobody at the CIA was ever confused about the mujahideen—they always understood these were jihadis. We owe this knowledge to vanity.
Robert Gates, Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, couldn’t keep his mouth shut—he couldn’t help boasting in his memoirs about US cleverness in Afghanistan. And he let it slip “that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention” (emphasis mine). This revelation was in complete contradiction with the official story, according to which Ronald Reagan’s pro-mujahideen policy had been a response to the arrival of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. No, no: ’twas the other way around.
The CIA had created a jihadi trap for the Soviets, and that is what brought the Soviets into Afghanistan.
Following Robert Gates’s vanity-fueled and careless revelation, Zbigniew Brzezinski sat down for an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. And he got to bragging, too. The title of the piece, quoting Brzezinski, was: ‘Yes, the CIA entered Afghanistan before the Russians.’
Brzezinski was asked the following question: “In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?” And Brzezinski answered:
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
(…)
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism [jihadism], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. (…)21
The reduction of the pro-jihadi policy to an anti-Soviet strategy is, in my view, more management of reality. Yes, they used jihadism against the Soviets, but there was also “a global policy in regard to Islam.” And, as with Iran-Contra, the pro-mujahideen policy associated with Ronald Reagan, Republican, was only continuing the policies of Jimmy Carter, Democrat.
3. Carter and Khomeini together in Afghanistan.
To round out this picture, guess who else supported the CIA’s Afghan jihadis against the Soviets? Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The common narrative one hears is that, while the US supported the Sunni jihadis in Afghanistan, Khomeini supported the Shia jihadis in the same country. This official story already reeks of close pro-jihadi coordination between Khomeini and the CIA.
But it gets worse, because, as even Wikipedia is aware, “Hizb-i Islami … headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” is the group of mujahideen “who enjoyed the largest amount of ISI Pakistan funding, Saudi intelligence funding, and American CIA funding.” This Hizb-i Islami group that the US bosses supported especially wanted what, exactly? Well, it “aimed for a state similar to that founded and led by Khomeini in Iran.”22
It is perhaps not a total surprise that Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami received support also from Khomeini’s Iran. In a document from RAND, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank, I find the following: “The Hezb-i-Islami has historically received assistance from the Iran and Pakistan governments, as well as the United States.”23
“Hekmatyar is infamous for his brutal battlefield tactics and backstabbing political deals, including the assassination of many of his political rivals. His reign of terror also included the shelling of Kabul during the 1992-1994 civil war, one of the only known instances when an acting prime minister bombarded his own capital.”24
Lovely.
When that mujahideen ‘order’ collapsed into factional conflict in the early 1990s, many regrouped as the Taliban under a stricter religious framework. But this all keeps going back to the same source. As the American Foreign Policy Council explains, “Experts estimate that almost all of the Taliban leaders and cadres … are products of the [Pakistani] madrassas”—the very madrassas that Pakistan had built on the Afghan border with Jimmy Carter’s CIA money. Moreover, “Most of the original Taliban leadership came from … one of the two main clerical resistance parties during the war against the Soviets: Hezb-i-Islami (Khalis) and Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi’s Harakat-I Ineqelab-ye Islami.”25
By the way, CIA/Pakistani-sponsored jihadism has also become a tremendous problem for India, as we discuss here:
4. Israel
And never forget: in the same year that Jimmy Carter installed Khomeini in Iran and launched the mujahideen from Pakistan, he forced Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to give the Sinai back to Egypt. The Sinai! This was a buffer gained by Israel fighting a defensive war against a genocidal threat, and it had made Israel invulnerable to Egyptian attack.
The management of reality
There is a process that I call ‘The Conditioning of the Partisan Mind,’ in which you are made to feel, by way of a million manufactured and consistent stimuli, that Democrats and Republicans are rivals and pursue different goals. If your partisan mind is well-conditioned, then this perception of rivalry becomes a kind of reflex.
And you’ll pick a side, thinking the contest matters. (That’s what the manipulators want: they want you thinking that you are in a democracy. So long as you pick a side, you are implicitly saying that you are in a democracy.)
We have seen with Iran-Contra, however, that Reagan-Bush’s billions of dollars in secret weapons to Khomeini were building on Carter’s policies. Reagan-Bush: Republicans; Carter: Democrat. What’s the difference? The MOR model says that both parties are in reality one and the same, controlled clandestinely by US Intelligence.
This alternative model of modern Western ‘democracy’ was first proposed by political theorist Maurice Joly in the 19th century.
The model applies, Joly explained, whenever the citizens allow an institutional and legal infrastructure by which intelligence bureaucrats may spend citizen monies in secret, because the inevitable consequence is that intelligence bureaucrats so empowered will corrupt every major institution, starting of course with the political parties.
We should suspect that this is the world we do live in because the US Congress created precisely this kind of institutional and legal infrastructure when it passed the National Security Act of 1947, as we explain here:
And evidence indeed abounds that, following Joly’s prediction, the entire US democratic system—not just the political parties—has been comprehensively corrupted.
Without leaving the focused boundary of this series, the Iran-Contra Affair, we can nevertheless point to a major empirical validation of Maurice Joly’s model of a counterfeit democracy. For the Iran-Contra congressional investigators discovered a CIA program dedicated to clandestine corruption of domestic institutions—internally called S/LPD and run from the Reagan-Bush White House—whose special mission was to assert total narrative control over US media and academia. The adjective “Orwellian” for this operation is not one that I need to append myself—the congressional investigators themselves employed it.
This same mechanism, or one very similar, was likely deployed to corrupt key members of Congress, including Democrats, because even the congressional Democrats helped to protect the Republican Reagan-Bush team from the consequences of the Iran-Contra scandal.
How so? Consider these facts closely. Congressional Democrats refused to extend the Iran-Contra investigations into the early years of Reagan’s presidency, where lay the smoking gun to refute Reagan-Bush’s propaganda lies, as narrated in Part 2 of this series:
If that were not quite enough, consider that the congressional Democrats helped to cover up the media-corruption scandal of the Republicans when they collaborated to remove from the congressional Iran-Contra Report the draft chapter documenting the “Orwellian” S/LPD (see Part 4).
By doing this, they protected George Bush Sr., Reagan’s vice-president, who was a former CIA Director and the likely mastermind of the entire Iran-Contra plus S/LPD operation. Thanks to that protection, and to the media’s restoring of Ronald Reagan’s prestige, George Bush Sr. won the next presidential election, after which he proceeded to seal the cover-up by pardoning everybody still under investigation.
If the Democrats had not collaborated to protect Bush and restore Reagan’s prestige, they could have easily won the next election and kept the White House for a couple of decades, at least. Instead, Reagan’s vice-president, the likely mastermind of the entire Iran-Contra operation, became the next president. The context loudly suggests that the Democrats were taking a dive. And that’s also what I claim the Democrats just did in the last (Biden/Harris vs. Trump) presidential election:
We have what, in MOR’s terminology, are dramatic facts, or diagnostically sufficient facts to rule out the hypothesis of real competition between the parties. Our default model should therefore be that US politics is a Grand Show, since the burden of proof is now entirely on those who still wish to see a real democracy as opposed to the cloaked totalitarianism of a power group that has controlled the Democrat and the Republican parties for quite some time now.
And what does this power cabal want? Apparently, World Jihad.
Pretty much all of US policy in Western Asia has been broadly consistent with this Machiavellian model. But this series is about Iran. So allow me to make one final connection here: US policy toward Israel, which for many purposes can be reduced to US policy toward PLO/Fatah, jihadi Iran’s daddy.
PLO/Fatah and Iran: the special relationship
I return to the remarkable historical fact with which this Part 7 began: it was PLO/Fatah that created Ayatollah Khomeini’s jihadi Iran, because they armed and trained Khomeini’s guerrillas in Lebanon—a process that appears to have been closely supervised by the CIA. And then PLO/Fatah proceeded to assist Ayatollah Khomeini in the consolidation of his terrorist institutions, including the IRGC and SAVAMA (which was really SAVAK, created by the CIA), even as Jimmy Carter was running all sorts of interference to ensure that Khomeini could take power.
The entire context suggests that PLO/Fatah was vital and precious to the CIA.
Consistent with that, when Israel invaded PLO/Fatah’s lair in Lebanon in 1982, Ronald Reagan—then secretly arming Ayatollah Khomeini—rushed to save a remnant of the organization and carry it, under US military protection, to its new home in Tunis.
Then, in 1989, RAND, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank, published a study by the CIA’s Graham Fuller that argued for the US to create a PLO/Fatah State in territory carved out of the State of Israel: Judea & Samaria (the alleged ‘West Bank’), and Gaza. Just a few years later, this became the so-called ‘Oslo Peace Process,’ a policy led and supported—and quite strongly—by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States.
That is all documented here:
Now,
since the US presidents have worked hard—via the Oslo Process—to install in the militarily strategic territories of Judea & Samaria and Gaza a terror group—PLO/Fatah—responsible for the creation of jihadi Iran;
since Iran is the State that openly promises to repeat the Shoah in Israel; and
since this policy has been consistent over all administrations, Democrat and Republican,
The model to defeat—if anybody wishes to try—is the model that says that the US bosses have had a pro-jihad and anti-Israel policy.
But can Trump, at least, be called an anomaly? Isn’t he pro-Israel?
Donald Trump protected the Iranian axis in Gaza, when he stopped the Israelis as they were about to destroy Hamas. And he extended NATO-protection to Qatar, a jihadi patron of Hamas that is home to the US’s most important military base outside of the United States. Trump protected the Iranian axis in Lebanon, when he stopped the Israelis as they were about to destroy Hezbollah. He also pulled the ayatollahs’ chestnuts out of the fire in the Twelve Day War, when he saved them from destruction. And when the Iranian axis collapsed in Syria, Trump rushed to replace them with other jihadis: Al Jolani’s ISIS terrorists.
But what is most telling? Perhaps this: on Judea & Samaria, Trump has expressed his categorical opposition to Israeli annexation, thus protecting the privileged position of PLO/Fatah—the very daddy of the Iranian axis—on militarily strategic territory of the Jewish State.
But you need overkill, so here: PLO/Fatah was created by a top leader of the German Nazi Final Solution (a fact every Westerner should know).
The CIA, too, is institutionally descended from the German Nazi Final Solution. In fact, as documented by historian Christopher Simpson—way back in 1988—with material released thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA was created by absorbing Adolf Hitler’s entire intelligence infrastructure in Eastern Europe, Fremde Heere Ost, plus quite a few SS officers.
Why did the US bosses absorb the Nazis? Because the Nazis were their dogs. As we explain and document in a different piece, the US bosses themselves led and financed the international eugenics movement, and their leadership and support nurtured the evolution of German eugenics into German Nazism.
Rounding out the context, you should know that, in WWII, the German Nazis had an extensive alliance with jihadism.26 So it is no surprise to see the US bosses—who absorbed those Nazis to create their intelligence infrastructure—allying with jihadis in the postwar.
So, yes, Trump is now attacking the ayatollahs, but the MOR model always makes the same prediction: he will screw Israel.
Why do we say this? Well, because we are looking at the entire context, one portion of which we have presented here. And Trump has been consistent with the history of US foreign policy: his moves have consistently promoted jihadism. The only apparent exception is his current war on Iran.
But it won’t be a real exception—you just wait.
Following the pattern of US presidents before him, we predict, Trump will find a way to produce a final outcome in this war that once again threatens Israeli security—like he did when he went to war against ISIS.
In conclusion, I recommend resisting the system’s efforts to suck you back into the Grand Show. But, in any case, pay attention to what comes next. The mainstream model, according to which Donald Trump is a great friend of Israel, will fail utterly to explain what is about to happen.
That is my claim.
We have explained and documented PLO/Fatah’s arming and training of Khomeini’s guerrillas in Lebanon here:
Source: The New York Times, May 17, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 6; Page 77, Column 3; Magazine Desk, 11464 words, "Putting The Hostages' Lives First"
Ignatius, David (12 November 2004). “In the end, CIA-PLO links weren’t helpful”. U-T San Diego. Archived from the original on 15 October 2012.
The New York Times, June 14, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 4; Page 1, Column 1; Week in Review Desk, 1284 words, PRIVATE WARRIORS; Hearings Detail a Policy Improvised by Outsiders, By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, WASHINGTON
It was Vincent Cannistraro who let this ‘detail’ slip. Who is Vincent Cannistraro? According to the PBS Frontline summary:
“Director of NSC Intelligence from 1984 to 1987, [Vincent] Cannistraro went on to serve as chief of operations for the CIA's Counter terrorism Center and to lead the CIA's investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103..."
The PBS Frontline interview is here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/interviews/
Ignatius, D. (2004, November 12). In the end, CIA-PLO links weren’t helpful. The Washington Post.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121015131618/http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041112/news_lz1e12ignatiu.html
Ignatius, David (16 September 2001). “Penetrating Terrorist Networks”. The Washington Post. p. B07. Archived from the original on 4 June 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2017.
quoted in: Moin, B. (1999). Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah. I.B. Tauris. (p.204).
Moin, B. (1999). Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah. I.B. Tauris. (p.205).
Moin, B. (1999). Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah. I.B. Tauris. (p.206).
Dreyfuss, Robert, and Thierry LeMarc. Hostage to Khomeini. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980. (p.1)
Ganji, M. (2002) Defying the Iranian Revolution. Praeger (p.29)
Huyser, R. E. (1986). Mission to Tehran. Harper & Row. (p.26)
‘ESSAY; IRAN'S COUNTER-INAUGURAL’; The New York Times; 19 January 1981; By William Safire.
‘Two Weeks in January: America's secret engagement with Khomeini’; BBC; 3 June 2016; By Kambiz Fattahi, BBC Persian Service.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36431160
‘US had extensive contact with Ayatollah Khomeini before Iran revolution’; The Guardian; 10 June 2016; by Saeed Kamali Dehghan in London and David Smith in Washington.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/10/ayatollah-khomeini-jimmy-carter-administration-iran-revolution
‘Two Weeks in January: America's secret engagement with Khomeini’; BBC; 3 June 2016; by By Kambiz Fattahi, BBC Persian Service
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36431160
Ganji, M. (2002) Defying the Iranian Revolution. Praeger (pp.29-30)
Khomeini Is Reported to Have a SAVAK of His Own; Khomeini Reported to Have Own SAVAK-Style Agency, The Washington Post, June 7, 1980, Saturday, Final Edition, First Section; A1, 17 06 words, By Michael Getler, Washington Post Staff Writer.
The New York Times, July 22, 1988, Friday, Late City Final Edition, Section A; Page 9, Column 1; National Desk, 1220 words, WASHINGTON TALK: THE MILITARY; Now Chiefs Fight for Command Nobody Wanted, By BERNARD E. TRAINOR, Special to the New York Times, WASHINGTON, July 21
Full text (translated from the French by Bill Blum):
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism [jihadism], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
SOURCE: Jauvert, V. (1998, January 15–21). Les révélations d’un ancien conseiller de Carter: “Oui, la CIA est entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes…” Le Nouvel Observateur, p. 76.
‘From Mashhad to Kabul: Iran’s Road to Regional Dominance’; Special Operations Forces (SOF) News; 14 April 2023; by Charles Davis.
https://sof.news/afghanistan/iran-regional-dominance/
Jones, S. G. (2008). Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. In Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (MG-595-OSD). RAND Corporation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/mg595osd.12
American Foreign Policy Council. (n.d.). Taliban. In World Almanac of Islamism. American Foreign Policy Council. (p.4)
https://almanac.afpc.org/uploads/documents/Taliban_2.pdf
Most of the original Taliban leadership came from the same three southern provinces—Kandahar, Uruzgan and Helmand—and nearly all of them fought under one of the two main clerical resistance parties during the war against the Soviets: Hezb-i-Islami (Khalis) and Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi’s Harakat-I Ineqelab-ye Islami. Most of the Taliban ulema (religious scholars and clerics) had completed their studies at Deobandi maddrassas in Pakistan’s Northwestern Frontier Province, one of the most famous being the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania located in Akora Khattak. Experts estimate that almost all of the Taliban leaders and cadres … are products of the [Pakistani] madrassas.
SOURCE: American Foreign Policy Council. (n.d.). Taliban. In World Almanac of Islamism. American Foreign Policy Council. (p.4)
https://almanac.afpc.org/uploads/documents/Taliban_2.pdf
The scholars Wolfgang Schwanitz and Barry Rubin have written a careful investigation of the relationship between the German Nazis and the jihadists during World War II.
Rubin, B., & Schwanitz, W. G. (2014). Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Iranians lay quite a bit of blame on Carter, but also on the British government. Their books place more blame on the latter (but it's possible that they do this in order to sell some books in the US). Obviously Britain had more influence on their society, and their media was BBC (British propaganda). BBC media was fawning over Khomeini every step of the way. But Carter played his role for certain.
theory on twitter: I used to get banned on it constantly for defending Israel and defying CIA bs. Since Musk bought it, I have not been banned or suspended once--but the only way he and Trump could run it as a full Der Sturmer propaganda medium was to suspend rules on bans/suspensions. Right now it's like 90% blatant Jewhating liars. So I'm inferring that this was why Musk took it over.