The British & U.S. Governments Installed Khomeini Into Power In 1979
Historian F. William Engdahl says in his 2004 book, “A Century Of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,” that the Carter administration changed U.S. policy towards Iran in 1978 by bringing in members from the Bilderberg Group to draw up covert plans to remove the Shah and bring Khomeini to the throne. Engdahl wrote:
“In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Brzezinski. Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalistic Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert Bowie from the CIA was one of the lead ‘case officers’ in the new CIA-led coup against the man their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier.
Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, as presented by British Islamic expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis, then on assignment at Princeton University in the United States. Lewis’s scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979 Bilderberg meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.
The coup against the Shah was run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American, Brzezinski, taking public ‘credit’ for getting rid of the ‘corrupt’ Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the background.
During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah’s government and British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction agreement. By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British ‘offer’ which demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output, while refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil. With their dependence on British-controlled export apparently at an end, Iran appeared on the verge of independence in its oil sales policy for the first time since 1953, with eager prospective buyers in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere.”
In his 1981 book, “Hostage to Khomeini,” journalist Robert Dreyfuss says that the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, and other elite think tanks conspired to take out the Shah and undo his modernization plans for Iran which they saw as a threat to their power and control over the region. Dreyfuss wrote:
“The mullahs did not come to rule in Iran on the basis of their own power; they were placed in power by men more evil than they – who would use the depravity of backwardness for their own ends.
In September 1975, the Aspen Institute held a symposium in Persepolis, Iran. The public side of the transactions was published years later under the title of Iran: Past, Present, and Future. In the behind-the-scenes discussion, the plans for reversing the Shah’s industrialization program and for turning Iran into a model dark ages regime were mapped out. It is a bitter twist of history, that the Shah and his wife Empress Farah Diba witlessly provided huge amounts of funding to the Aspen project.
Attending the Persepolis symposium were at least a dozen members of the Club of Rome, including its chairman, Aureho Peccei; Sol Linowitz of Coudert Brothers law firm; Jacques Freymond of the Institute of International Studies in Geneva; and Robert O. Anderson and Rarlan Cleveland, both Aspen Institute officials and associates of the Club of Rome in the United States. Other luminaries were also on hand: Charles Yost, Catherine Bateson, Richard Gardner, Theo Sommer, Daniel Yankelovitch, John Oakes of the New York Times, and the cream of Anglo-Amencan intelligence specialists on Iran, such as James Bill, Marvin Zonis, Leonard Binder, Rouhollah Ramazani, and Charles Issawi.
The Aspen Institute session stressed a single theme: modernization and industry undermine the “spiritual, nonmaterial” values of ancient Iranian society, and these values must he preserved above all else.”