The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

A WEEK AFTER Jimmy Carter’s departure from Iran, a Tehran newspaper published a savage attack on an implacable opponent of the Shah’s, an elderly Shiite cleric named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was then living in exile in Iraq. The article, though anonymous, appeared to be the work of an official of the Shah’s regime. Perhaps the Carter visit had bolstered flagging confidence. Certainly the article was already in the works, for exasperation was increasing with Khomeini’s own harsh attacks on the Shah’s government, which were being circulated clandestinely in cassettes throughout Iran. Animosity between the royal house of Iran and the fundamentalists of the dominant Shia Islamic sect dated back to Reza Shah’s fierce battle for power with the Shiite clergy in the 1920s and 1930s and was part of a much larger struggle between secular and religious forces. But that newspaper article of January 7, 1978, triggered a wholly new stage in the struggle.