The Betrayal

Carter, Khomeini, and America's Secret Surrender in Iran

Kambiz Fattahi

The inside history of four decades of secret diplomacy, covert operations, and mutual suspicion, and of how it ended in America's catastrophic surrender in Iran and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

On January 3, 1979, with Tehran paralyzed by strikes and Iran's generals weighing a coup, President Jimmy Carter sat in the Cabinet Room and made a decision he would never fully acknowledge. The United States would quietly ease Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi off his throne while publicly insisting he had chosen exile on his own. A four-star American general was dispatched to Tehran in civilian clothes to tell Iran's military leaders to stand down and accept a placeholder civilian government. The White House believed it was engineering a soft landing for a nonaligned Iran. Instead, it handed the keys to a theocracy and suffered one of the worst strategic defeats in American history.

In The Betrayal, investigative journalist Kambiz Fattahi shows that this was no sudden failure by a divided administration. Rather, it was the culmination of a relationship built on cynical calculation, double-dealing, and a long habit of choosing expedience over principle. Drawing on thousands of declassified American and British records, he traces the story from the 1941 Allied invasion that put a twenty-one-year-old Shah on the throne to the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy.

Along the way, he uncovers what other histories missed: America's palace coup plots, the Shah's abdication threats and his Moscow gambit, Khomeini's quiet overtures to Washington, and startling new revelations about what the U.S. knew of the Shah's hidden nuclear ambitions and secret illness.

Propulsive, rigorously documented, and revelatory, The Betrayal dismantles decades of conventional wisdom to deliver the fullest account yet of how Washington betrayed Iran's secular forces, empowered the Islamists, and reshaped the modern Middle East.

Kambiz Fattahi is an investigative journalist with over two decades of experience reporting on American foreign policy, covert diplomacy, and Middle Eastern affairs. He currently serves as the director of Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and previously led BBC Persian’s U.S. operations. His investigative reporting has uncovered previously unknown episodes in U.S.-Iran relations. Kambiz holds a master’s degree in U.S. National Security Studies from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is fluent in English and Persian. The Betrayal is his first book.

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