This is the week of Valentine’s Day and the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. On February 11, 1979, the monarchy was officially brought down, and Khomeini assumed leadership over Iran while guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed Pahlavi loyalists in armed combat. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran happened because of President Jimmy Carter, as did the installation of Ayatollah Khomeini.
I wrote a major book on this subject, “Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos,” in 2009 after interviewing over 100 primary leaders who were aware of the plot. I met with Empress Farah Pahlavi at her home in Georgetown. She had read my book.
She said that on the Persian New Year, when Jimmy Carter visited with her and her husband, after Jimmy Carter signed the guestbook, he told her husband, “You will release political prisoners, provide freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. If you don’t, I will not give you any replacement parts for your helicopters or your planes. I can do this under a new law that suspends foreign aid over human rights.”
The Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi said when he left, “If I do what he is asking, the Russians will invade Afghanistan or Iraq will attack Iran. There’ll be an Islamic Revolution in Iran with Khomeini taking over the country. And who knows what horror will come upon the earth?”
Everything that the Shah predicted came to pass. The October 7 massacre, which Israel just experienced, would not have happened, in that Hamas is a proxy of Iran and funded and even trained many of the terrorists who were involved in the attack.
I met with President Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France on the Carter Plot. Khomeini was living in France at the time with the CIA living on the same street.
He told me that Carter called for a summit on the French Republican island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean with him, the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl Schmidt, and the British Prime Minister James Callaghan. D’Estaing told me that it was there that Carter told them of his plan to overthrow the Shah and put Khomeini in power. He said to me that he told Carter in French, “You’re a bastard of conscience. You betrayed an ally.”
Jimmy Carter sent General Robert Huyser, a four-star general in the Air Force who served as Deputy Commander in Chief of the United States European Command, to Iran as a special emissary to persuade the Iranian military to acquiesce to the Shah’s exile. Huyser represented not only the US but also the entire Western alliance. His counterpart in Iran agreed to the exile of Pahlavi only after Huyser produced copies of the record of the meeting in Guadeloupe.
Before Huyser’s death in 1997, I met with him at his home. During the meeting, the general told me Jimmy Carter was responsible for overthrowing the Shah. “Carter had deceived not only the Shah but me also. All of the generals and military leaders that I persuaded to stand down, promising them protection, were assassinated by committee,” he said in tears.
On April Fool’s Day 1979, Khomeini declared the first day of the government of God. In July of that year, President Jimmy Carter inked a top-secret document launching America on the path that would lead to the death of 2,979 innocent American civilians on September 11, 2001. It was the first order to send aid to the Afghan rebels fighting against the Soviet invaders. They would provide the weapons and know-how to train the Taliban in terror tactics, leading to the creation of the Taliban and giving rise to the skyline of a Saudi prince, a ruthless young man named Osama bin Laden.
Isser Harel, the head of Israeli intelligence, told me on the 23rd of September 1980 at his home with the then-senior adviser to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Reuben Hecht, my mentor, that the US openly supported Khamenei and his Islamic Revolution he said:
“Carter believed Khomeini was going to pursue human rights reformations in Iran. The US government was writing checks to the committee in increments of $150 million.” I later met with the US operative who was directly involved in funding the cleric.
Harel told us that “Khomeini’s French operation was paid for by the US, including the Air France flight that returned the fanatical Islamic cleric to Tehran.” In that same meeting, I asked Harel, “What did you think would happen to Anwar Sadat?”
He said, “We’ve saved his life several times. But he’ll do something at an inopportune time, and the Muslim Brotherhood will kill him.”
As we were meeting, there was a presidential election going on, and Jimmy Carter was ahead in the polls against Ronald Reagan. I asked him who he thought would win the election. He said, “The Iranians will have something to say about that. When Ronald Reagan puts his hand on the Bible, the hostages will be released.”
My phone rang just as Ronald Reagan put his hand on the Bible. It was Reuben Hecht, Begin’s senior adviser, saying, “Harel’s a prophet. It’s happening exactly as he told us.”
What I found out later was that Carter had used Cyrus Vance, the former US Secretary of State, to negotiate through the Algerians to buy back hostages. The Iranians were holding back because they were using the hostages to try to keep Carter from being reelected. But the morning of the inauguration at 4:21 am, Jimmy Carter wire transferred $7.9 billion from the Federal Reserve to the Bank of England to buy back the hostages.
I asked Harel one more question: “Do you think terrorism will ever come to America?”
He said, “America has the power but not the will. The terrorists have the will but not the power. All of that can change with time. You kill a fly and rejoice. We kill one, and 100 come to the funeral. The first terrorist attack will be in New York City and on your tallest building.”
Then he said, “Felix is not a cat,” referring to the fertility symbols in the Middle East and New York being America’s greatest fertility symbol and its tallest building.
The liberal left has convinced many Americans that the war on terror cannot be won through military actions. The desire to negotiate no matter the cost gives rise to those in the West who become unwitting cohorts of the jihadists.
US President Joe Biden issued a memorandum linking American military aid globally to adherence to international humanitarian law, including for Israel, as he called the IDF’s military operation in Gaza “over the top.”
Forms of military aid could be suspended If reports of violations are found credible, according to the National Security Memorandum issued on Thursday night.
Countries receiving military aid have 45 days, by February 8, to assure the US that they would comply with the memorandum or risk a pause in the delivery of that aid.
The liberal left believed then, and still does today, that evil really doesn’t exist. People are basically good, and America should embrace the perpetrator and castigate the victims.
The pressure that Israel is experiencing over its war with Iran’s proxy, Hamas, is a perfect example of what happens when the world lacks moral clarity, especially in light of Iran, which is racing to declare that it’s an atomic Islamic state, which they believe they must use on Israel to usher in the Islamic messiah, the Mahdi.
If Hitler had an atomic bomb, we would all be speaking German.
It was Winston Churchill who said that the world lacked the democratic courage, intellectual honesty, and willingness to act to stop Hitler’s war machine in 1935. If they had stopped him then, 61 million people would not have died.
Mike Evans is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and #1 New York Times bestselling author with 119 published books. He is the Founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem, the Ten Boom Holocaust Museum in Haarlem, Holland, and the Jerusalem Prayer Team, the largest pro-Israel Facebook page in the world.