How a cancer diagnosis ended the US-Iran relationship

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It always starts small.

There's something here.

This is not right.

Then that small, innocuous thing starts to snowball.

We know they blow them up.

And quickly gathers pace.

At that point, I have no choice.

And before you know it, it's out of control.

You don't need to rescue money.

It's the last resort.

And no one can contain it anymore.

Beef.

When small feuds take on a life of their own.

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This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug, and Iora people.

We tend to think of revolutions as things that happened a long time in the past.

The American, Russian, and French revolutions are certainly important, but like, nobody's around that remembers them.

For some reason, we seem to forget that one of the most important revolutions in in history happened like 46 years ago, like more recently than the release of the first Star Wars movie.

In fact, people who participated in the Iranian Revolution had the opportunity of watching Star Wars in surround sound at cinemas in Tehran before they overthrew the Shah.

In many ways, we're still living through the effects of the Iranian Revolution.

In fact, we're kind of living through a clash between the effects of the Iranian and American revolutions when you think about it.

So, with Iran dominating the news yet again, we're going to be bringing you episodes from our archive about the Iranian revolution over the next two weeks.

This one, about the last Shah of Iran, first aired in February 2024.

It was 1974 and two French doctors, specialists in blood diseases, arrived in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

The The appointment they'd been called to was odd.

They met with a government minister who had cancer, but he didn't seem to want their professional advice.

He just wanted to have a nice lunch with the doctors and a chat.

But as the dinner was ending, the real reason they were there finally became clear.

His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shan Shah, King of Kings.

See, Iranian culture is extremely secretive about illnesses, even more so when it's the king who's sick.

The Shah was in his 33rd year as the country's absolute monarch.

He has reigned as a benevolent despot, retaining all real power in his own hands.

He was in his 50s, handsome and fit, but told the doctors he felt a lump on his left side under his ribs.

He wanted them to find out what it was.

without leaving a paper trail.

No x-rays, no scans, no charts, no notes.

They did some very sneaky tests and diagnosed him with cancer, leukemia.

Incredibly, this discovery, this one man's cancer diagnosis, led directly to the situation we're in today, where Iran has for 45 years been arch enemy of America.

The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve.

And where we are now seeing open warfare between the US and Iran becoming more and more likely by the day.

Since the Iran-backed group Hamas attacked Israel in October, both Israel and the United States have been striking other Iran-backed militant groups around the region in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Meanwhile, those groups have been accused of attacking American military bases and Navy ships.

It's a bit scary, and as tensions rise higher than they've been in decades, it's worth knowing how all this started.

With something tiny, a small lump in the spleen of one man.

Today, the Shakespearean tragedy that brought about the end of the Iranian monarchy and how it shaped the Middle East conflict we're seeing today.

I'm Matt Bevan

and this is If You're Listening.

So, how did the Shah become ruler, eventually get cancer and change the course of history?

Well, like many tortured leaders, he had daddy issues.

Mohammad Reza and his twin sister were born in 1919 to a military officer with no connection to the royal family.

His father was ambitious and violent.

He liked to kick insubordinate subordinates in the balls if they didn't follow his orders.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, his dad led a military coup against the sitting Shah and seized the crown of Iran when Mohammed was six.

I don't know if he kicked the old Shah in the nuts while he was taking his crown, but he may have.

Muhammad's dad changed the name of the country from Persia to Iran and embarked on a mission to modernise it, no matter how many groins he had to kick to achieve it.

Muhammad was his father's favourite,

but that turned out to be a curse.

His dad thought that if a father showed affection to their son, he might turn out gay.

And he didn't want that for his favourite son, so he basically ignored him until he was a teenager.

By 1941, Britain decided that Mohammed Reza's dad wasn't being helpful enough in the war against the Nazis.

So they invaded and kicked him in the groin.

Not really, but they did kick him out of the country and replaced him with our main character, his son Muhammad.

Muhammad, the new king, was a complex young man.

He was reclusive and a womanizer.

His twin sister was the alpha of two.

His treatment by his father and childhood as crown prince had turned him into a sensitive fellow, who many described as sad.

At 22, Mohammad Reza had found himself the Shah of a country which now formed the key connection between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, hobnobbing with Premier Joseph Stalin and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But he was very ambitious about what he could achieve as Shah.

He refused to organise a coronation ceremony for himself, saying, I am not proud to be the king of a poor and hungry people.

He vowed not to be crowned until his people were educated, well-fed, and lived lives equivalent to Europeans.

The Army's literacy corps set up thousands of schools throughout the country to bring education to Persia's 28 million people.

Thankfully, the enormous oil reserves found under the Iranian desert made that a real possibility.

Persia is moving up in the world and oil is paying the way.

Supported by the British and American connections he'd made during the war, he intensified his father's modernization program, spending big on road, rail, health, education and defense projects.

He saw himself as a man of the people, of sorts.

He would drive around the streets of Tehran in one of his many sports cars and chat with average Iranians.

But that didn't last.

In 1948, while out in public, he was shot.

Bullets fired by a fanatic hit his left shoulder and also nicked his cheek and lip.

He withdrew from contact with the public, and after a coup in 1953, he basically dispensed with any form of representative government.

The Shah decided he couldn't trust a government to deliver his modernisation plans.

He'd do it himself.

It's better than democracy anyway.

We don't make false promises in the elections, at least.

What we say to our people is exactly what we can give them.

He would modernize the country through sheer force of will.

The feudal system was abolished and gradually the big estates of wealthy landowners were shared among their former serfs.

Once the country was industrialized then it'd be ready for democracy.

The shares of the factories will be distributed first to the workers, then to the farmers, then to the general public.

And it was working.

By the mid-70s, Iran established itself as one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

With its new banks, supermarkets and hotels, Tehran, the capital, has grown dramatically in recent years.

Donkeys and camels roamed along here not long ago.

Its GDP was growing at 10% a year.

Women have also benefited under the Shah's regime.

They are now able to work in all areas and have the vote.

Except that he has now imposed a one-party system which leaves little choice.

In parts of Tehran, you could see young men and women walking around in European 70s fashion, mini skirts and unbuttoned shirts.

The Shah had lots of fans in the West, including here at the ABC.

That the Shah has managed to survive so many turbulent years is a tribute to the leadership of this tough and resilient man.

Ivan Chapman for Weekend Magazine.

Whoa, yeah, okay, Ivan.

Bump the brakes a bit, chap.

The Shah thought it was his divine responsibility to rule Iran as a benevolent dictator.

I have a divine command of doing what I'm doing.

And this in addition to the special relationship between the Persian people and their king.

In fact, the Shah, like most dictators, was surrounded by yes men and far more repressive than he seemed.

It was a remarkably repressive regime, a regime that existed only by the power of both the army and the SAVAC secret police.

The SAVAC would kidnap opponents of the Shah and take them off somewhere to torture them by zapping them with electrodes, dripping acid in their nostrils and other creative methods.

One historian lists one of Savak's torture methods as simply being snakes.

I don't know what the snakes were used for, but anyway, snakes.

So this is the situation in 1974 when the Shah felt a lump under his ribcage.

The King of of Kings was diagnosed with leukemia.

His personal doctor tried to stop the French experts from telling the Shah what he had.

Remember, Iranian culture is very secretive about illness.

A previous Shah had been shot dead in the street, but his aides propped his body up in his carriage and took it back to the palace and pulled a weekend at Bernie's for several days while they sorted out the succession.

And so the Queen didn't find out about his cancer for three years.

Public didn't find out until he was on the verge of death.

How much he knew about his own condition is unclear, but what is clear is the Shah knew that his reign was going to end soon.

I'm preparing my succession in any case.

That if

my hair

has the same chance that I have had, and the same special relationship with his people.

But there was still so much more to be done.

He would have to go faster.

I have

this firm belief that I have a mission to accomplish.

This is one of those turning points that historical fiction is written about.

You know, imagine a world where the Nazis won the war, where JFK was never shot, where the Shah never got cancer.

Would Iran and the US be in a decades-long Cold War if the Shah hadn't rushed his modernization plans?

Government spending increased.

He started lending huge amounts of money to neighboring countries, hoping to increase the general stability of the Middle East by making everyone richer.

With American help, he set up a nuclear energy program, hoping to fast-track his country into superpower status with nuclear power and possibly nuclear weapons.

To secure his family's position, he entered into a number of spectacular arms deals with Western countries.

He bought weaponry like a kid kid in a toy shop.

But many Iranians were upset by his leadership.

Persian culture had a 2,500-year-old history, and the Shah was trying to replace that in the few years he had left.

And his reforms were being undermined by corruption.

The socio-economic system of the country became totally clogged with corruption, with

police brutality, and with similar

impediments to real progress, and the system system was incapable of solving its own problems.

His SAVAC secret police became more brutal with their electrodes and acid and snakes.

The Shah, sensing rising public dissatisfaction, became increasingly paranoid and isolated.

But as they say, it's not paranoid if the threat is real.

After months of violent riots and protests, in February 1979, 45 years ago this week, the revolution was complete.

He didn't get his 30 years.

In the last few violent weeks, Imperial Iran has collapsed.

The Shah in exile, his mighty army beaten in the streets, his secret service purged, his oil wells shut down.

His country under the rule of Islamic-styled men of God.

The Shah fled the country, and an Islamic religious leader known as the Ayatollah Khomeini took control.

Contrary to Islamic tradition, the image of Khomeini glowers down from every high point in Tehran.

The

has his own important place in the history of Iran, but that is another story which we'll get to next week.

Figuring out where to flee to was a massive problem for the Shah because other countries weren't keen to piss off Iran's new rulers by giving him refuge.

He was forced to bounce from country to country while becoming more and more unwell.

Years of trying to keep his condition a secret had led him to get worse medical care than even a middle-class Iranian would have been able to get.

He wound up in Mexico, where the doctors thought he had malaria, and suggested that he be transferred to New York for specialist treatment.

And despite the risk that this would seriously irritate the Ayatollahs, President Jimmy Carter agreed.

As expected, it did irritate the Ayatollahs.

The Chief Justice of Iran's new revolutionary court put a bounty on the Shah's head and issued this utterly unhinged statement.

I have asked all Muslims and Iranian students in the United States to wait outside the hospital and then go inside and take him away, he said.

The Ayatollah said he didn't know if the Shah had cancer or not, but that in any case, he must die.

Nobody killed the Shah in New York, but in Tehran, a large group of Iranian students decided to take vengeance on the Americans through their embassy.

The event that the United States has always feared in Iran has now taken place.

400 armed students have taken over the U.S.

embassy and are holding diplomats hostage.

52 hostages were taken and a ransom price was set.

They're demanding that Washington send back the Shah from America, where he's undergoing cancer treatment.

The United States wasn't going to do that.

They piled crushing sanctions onto the Iranian economy to try and force the government to send the hostages back.

The hostages were released the hour after President Carter left office, a deliberate punishment against him.

By then, the Shah was dead, and the damage was done.

The hostage crisis led to sanctions, and the sanctions were never lifted.

The US and Iran have been enemies ever since.

This is the lasting legacy of the Shah.

He's a man who instituted sweeping reforms, many of which the giant military, the nuclear program, the secret police, are now keeping the Ayatollahs in power.

He's also a man who was supported, then harboured by America, leading to a retaliation and a lasting atmosphere of hostility between the US and Iran.

So far, the tension has not exploded into open warfare.

Hopefully it stays that way.

Well, it didn't.

It very briefly did explode into open warfare, but hopefully the genie is back in the bottle for now.

If you're listening as written by me, Matt Bevan, this episode first aired in 2024 with supervising producer Yasmin Parry.

Next week, the Ayatollah, who dreamed of an Iranian caliphate.

When a young American dumped his belongings and disappeared into the great sandy desert, it triggered one of the biggest land searches Australia had ever seen.

But there was one problem: how do you search for someone who doesn't want to be found?

Join me for a story spanning three decades, two continents, and some very strange encounters as I try to understand why someone with everything to live for would plunge into one of Australia's most deadly landscapes.

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