A failure of imagination? Britain, 'the narrative of liberalisation' and the fall of the Shah

How do we know when a country has entered a revolutionary situation? In the aftermath of the turmoil around the Arab Spring and the varied responses it has generated, this is a question that has returned to haunt analysts and foreign policymakers. All the more so because the ghost of 1979 and the failure to predict the revolutionary upheaval that overthrew the last Shah of Iran and transformed Iran from a staunch Western ally into an ideological opponent, continues to affect the way in which we seek to address challenges of this nature. This chapter will look at the way in which the British FCO and the embassy in Tehran in particular bore witness to the events that unfolded through 1978 through a close interrogation of the biweekly reports that were dispatched to London and the manner in which these were assessed an interpreted, not only by the desk officers in London but likewise by their Iranian interlocutors. Charting the narrative from within and without the benefit of hindsight, the chapter will begin in January 1978 - the ostensible ‘start’ of the revolution with the publication of the article in Etelaat which no one at the time appears to have noticed - through to the summer and autumn of 1978 as diplomats and analysts scrambled to make sense of an increasingly confused and dangerous situation. The chapter will conclude with the FCO’s own assessment of its failures.