The Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council was appointed in 1959 to advance humanistic and social science research in and on the Near and Middle East. Over the years, in addition to offering fellowships and grants, it has held workshops and conferences to investigate topics which would allow humanists and social scientists to understand this vital area better. When appropriate, the papers from the conferences have been published as scholarly volumes.

This discussion is concerned with political, non-commercial publications rather than with the trade publications or the government, documents put out by the Ministry of National Guidance and the Iranian embassies in various Western countries. It must also be stated at the outset that such a survey cannot be entirely comprehensive due to the unreliability of information coming out of revolutionary Iran. Who can claim to have complete bibliographic information at a time of unsurpassed printing activities by all sorts of political groups within Iran, as well as the opposition abroad? However, the events surrounding the overthrow of the Shah must have convinced everyone of the importance of knowing about the current situation so as to formulate an informed opinion. It is futile to speculate what relations with Iran would be like if the decision-makers in the West had taken seriously the publications listed in the writer’s bibliography. The Iranian Opposition in Exile (Wiesbaden, 1979). One is flabbergasted to hear from Western Iranists that “by the 1970s opposition within Iran was dwindling to insignificant proportions and an open, organized form was nonexistent” [Iran under the Pahlavis, ed. C. Lencz-kowski (Stanford, 1978), p. 461]. The misinterpretation of the post-Pahlavi era comes from the failure to realize the adverse effect of Chinese and Soviet support for the Shah.

In Iran, in 1953, CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, helped plan a coup d’état, which had been plotted and prearranged by British and American interests. According to Roosevelt, the objective, successfully achieved at a cost of only $75,000, was to force Prime Minister Mossadegh out of power and return the Shah, who had fled the country, to his throne. In a recent memoir, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), Roosevelt details his Iranian escapades: the dinner parties, the political plotting sessions, the unobtrusive contacts with the Persian military, the manipulated mass appeal, and demonstrations. For such a serious matter, Roosevelt is surprisingly candid in his effort to recreate the feel of the times, the dialogue of the participants, the sequence of events, and the ease with which Great Powers, through their agents, could control events. It is a circus atmosphere in which the author himself is at the center of attention and power.