723 Engdahl: Het was de CIA die Khomeiny aan de macht bracht.

Pagina 171-174  van William Engdahl's boek "A Century of War."

In November 1978, President Carter [1] named the Bilderberg [2] group's George Ball
[3], another member of the Trilateral Commission [4], to head a special White House
Iran task force under the National Security Council's Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski
[5]. George Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and
support the fundamentalistic Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini [6].

Robert Bowie [7] 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 [8].

Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenon of Islamic
fundamentalism, as presented by British-Jew Islamic expert, Bernard Lewis [9], then
on assignment at Princeton University in the United States.

Bernard Lewis's scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979 Bilderberg meeting (April
27-29) in Baden, Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood [10] movement
behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East
along tribal and religious lines.

Bernard Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the
Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azarbaijanis, 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, like that against Mossadegh in 1953 [11], 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 [12]. 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
its lead editorial that September, Iran's Kayhan International stated:

     In retrospect, the 25-year partnership with the [British Petroleum] consortium
and the 50-year relationship with British Petroleum which preceded it, have not been
satisfactory ones for Iran … Looking to the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil
Company] should plan to handle all operations by itself.

London was blackmailing and putting enormous economic pressure on the Shah's regime
by refusing to buy Iranian oil production, taking only 3 million or so barrels daily
of an agreed minimum of 5 million barrels per day. This imposed dramatic revenue
pressures on Iran, which provided the context in which religious discontent against
the Shah could be fanned by trained agitators deployed by British and U.S.
intelligence. In addition, strikes among oil workers at this critical juncture
crippled Iranian oil production.

As Iran's domestic economic troubles grew, American 'security' advisers to the Shah's
SAVAK secret police [13] implemented a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a
manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah. At the same time, the
Carter administration cynically began protesting abuses of "human rights" under the
Shah.

British Petroleum reportedly began to organize capital flight out of Iran, through
its strong influence in Iran's financial and banking community. The British
Broadcasting Corporation's Persian-language broadcasts, with dozens of
Persian-speaking BBC 'correspondents' sent into even the smallest village, drummed up
hysteria against the Shah.

The BBC gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran during this
time. The British government-owned broadcasting organization refused to give the
Shah's government an equal chance to reply. Repeated personal appeals from the Shah
to the BBC yielded no result. Anglo-American intelligence [14] was committed to
toppling the Shah.

The Shah fled in January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been flown into Tehran
to proclaim the establishment of his repressive theocratic state to replace the
Shah's government.

Reflecting on his downfall months later, shortly before his death, the Shah noted
from exile:

     I did not know it then – perhaps I did not want to know – but it is clear to me
now that the Americans wanted me out. Clearly this is what the human rights advocates
in the State Department wanted … What was I to make of the Administration's sudden
decision to call former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the White House as an
adviser on Iran? … George Ball was among those Americans who wanted to abandon me and
ultimately my country. [15]

With the fall of the Shah and the coming to power of the fanatical Khomeini adherents
in Iran, chaos was unleashed. By May 1979, the new Khomeini regime had singled out
the country's nuclear power development plans and announced cancellation of the
entire program for French and German nuclear reactor construction. [16]

Iran's oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3 million barrels per
day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in the critical days of January 1979 was
also cut by some 2 million barrels per day. To add to the pressures on world oil
supply, British Petroleum declared force majeure and cancelled major contracts for
oil supply. Prices on the Rotterdam spot market, heavily influenced by BP and Royal
Cutch Shell as the largest oil traders, soared in early 1979 as a result. The second
oil shock of the 1970s was fully under way.

Indications are that the actual planners of the Iranian Khomeini coup in London and
within the senior ranks of the U.S. liberal establishment decided to keep President
Carter largely ignorant of the policy and its ultimate objectives. The ensuing energy
crisis in the United States was a major factor in bringing about Carter's defeat a
year later.

There was never a real shortage in the world supply of petroleum. Existing Saudi and
Kuwaiti production capacities could at any time have met the 5-6 million barrels per
day temporary shortfall, as a U.S. congressional investigation by the General
Accounting Office months later confirmed.

Unusually low reserve stocks of oil held by the Seven Sisters oil multinationals
contributed to creating a devastating world oil price shock, with prices for crude
oil soaring from a level of some $14 per barrel in 1978 towards the astronomical
heights of $40 per barrel for some grades of crude on the spot market. Long gasoline
lines across America contributed to a general sense of panic, and Carter energy
secretary and former CIA director, James R. Schlesinger [17], did not help calm
matters when he told Congress and the media in February 1979 that the Iranian oil
shortfall was 'prospectively more serious' than the 1973 Arab oil embargo. [18]

The Carter administration's Trilateral Commission foreign policy further ensured that
any European effort from Germany and France to develop more cooperative trade,
economic and diplomatic relations with their Soviet neighbor, under the umbrella of
détente and various Soviet-west European energy agreements, was also thrown into
disarray.

Carter's security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and secretary of state, Cyrus Vance
[19], implemented their 'Arc of Crisis' policy, spreading the instability of the
Iranian revolution throughout the perimeter around the Soviet Union. Throughout the
Islamic perimeter from Pakistan to Iran, U.S. initiatives created instability or
worse. [20]

* William Engdahl, "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World
Order", 1992. Pages 171-174. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/074532309X