Por Charlotte Dennett
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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain |
On February 11th, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met yet again with President Trump on his sixth visit since Trump resumed the presidency. It got me to wondering: why all these private meetings between the two leaders? What are they up to now?
This time the meeting was about Iran, trying to work out a nuclear deal while keeping Tehran from expanding its regional influence and proxy militias. But getting control of Iran’s oil could be quietly in the works, similar to what happened in Venezuela. Trump’s ordering the U.S.S. Gerald Ford — the largest and most sophisticated battleship carrying up to 75 aircraft — away from Venezuela towards Iran, cannot be lost on Iranians.
According to former-Pentagon, Middle East specialist Jasmine Gamal, “The fact that that carrier is there tells me that this isn’t just a routine kind of, ‘Hey, let’s flex some muscle.’ …This is not a dress rehearsal.” Trump has previously stated he wants regime change. So does Netanyahu. Consider that their neo-con supporters have been itching to get control of Iran for its oil ever since 2001, when a Pentagon official told retired NATO commander Wesley Clark that the Pentagon had plans to “attack and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan —and Iran, the last holdout that has managed to remain intact, although seriously weakened. Today, with massive natural gas required to fuel AI data bases, seizing Iran’s huge oil deposits (in size, just behind those of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia) could be on the agenda, regardless of the cost in blood and treasure. Notes CNN, Iran “has a leg up on Venezuela, whose authoritarian regime allowed the country’s oil infrastructure to crumble over the past couple decades. By contrast, Iran’s infrastructure is in decent shape.”
The Art of Deception
In short, are Trump’s negotiators going throuogh the motions of diplomacty while preparing for military action? The previous meeting between Trump and Netanyahu on December 29th was billed as discussions around a Gaza cease fire. I couldn’t help but note an online comment from a viewer of NBC coverage of the December meeting “This is scary….they’re setting up a scheme.”
The commenter may have been right. Gaza was on the official agenda, but performing regime change in Venezuela surely was too, but in secret. Four days later, on January 4th, US special forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from his home in a highly efficient operation that had many wondering if Israelis were involved. Venezuela’s vice president Delsi Rodriguez immediately observed “The governments of the world are shocked that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the victim and target of an attack of this nature, which undoubtedly has Zionist undertones.” Maduro himself predicted a month earlier that “the far-right Zionists want to hand this country over to the devils.” Given Venezuela’s close relations with Iran, these devil-references would likely go over well in the land that sees the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and Israel, according to the Jerusalem Post, as “The Little Satan.”
At times, according to the Post, Israel actually secretly sided with Iran for geopolitical reasons. “During the eight-year Iraq-Iran war ( 1980-1988), clandestine Israeli arms sales to Iran “helped turn the tide of the war and prevent Iran from falling to Saddam’s forces.”
For a Latin American equivalent to clandestine Israeli involvement in regime change during the 1980s, The Chris Hedges report on Guatemala, entitled The Silent Holocaust is instructive. Hedges, along with human rights lawyer (and daughter of a Holocaust escapee) Jennifer Harbury, relay how Israel provided sophisticated military equipment and advice to Guatemalan military leaders to achieve regime change in 1982, resulting in the genocidal regime of General Rios Montt. . General Mont’s chief of staff openly referred to the “Palestinization” of Guatemala’s indigenous Mayan tribes.
So here we are, as Trump sends another US battleship to within striking range of Iran, and orders more attacks on Venezuelan boats. To the disgust of many Vermonters, he has also sent F35 fighter planes commandeered by Vermont National Guardsmen to the Middle East.
Iran, in response to the U.S. military buildup, is conducting military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping route in the Middle East where 20% of the world’s oil passes. On February 17th, following more negotiations in Geneva, Vice President JD Vance opined that the talks on nuclear issues showed some progress, “but Iran won’t acknowledge Trump’s red lines.” Iran, for its part, just launched missiles toward the Strait of Hormuz.
It’s hard to say which scenario could be more “scary”: a US military invasion of Venezuela, or a US invasion of Iran. Regarding the former, I previously wrote that Trump lacked a historical understanding of Latin America and the strong memories that our neighbors to the south have of previous US interventions for regime change. U.S. boots on the ground—usually required for regime change —would be counter-productive, if not catastrophic.
Trump likely realized as much, and opted for regime-change-by-abduction instead. (In fact, it is more like a leadership change, as the Maduro regime remains intact)
As for Iran, the Iranian people, divided as they are about the theocratic regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, share the bitter memory of the CIA’s 1953 coup that overturned the nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadegh and brought the Shah in to replace him. I would wager that the majority of Iranians have no love for the United States, especially after the U.S.’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” dropped bunker busters on Iran’s underground nuclear reactors during its seven day war last June and reportedly killed 1000 people. Albeit it, with one significant exception: well-off Iranians who thrived under the monarchial reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi are eager to support the Shah’s son in taking power if regime change occurs.
Ra Ra for the Shah’s son
This was confirmed by Israeli journalist Alex Traiman on February 20th writing on “the calculations behind Netanyahu’s emergency meeting with Trump” for the Jewish News Service .“Iranians seek a return toward the path of modernity, freedom and prosperity, akin to the period previously attributed to Shah Reza Pahlavi’s leadership prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that ushered in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”
Akin to the Shah’s leadership? That’s a stretch, as I will reveal below.
On Friday, February 13th Christian Amanpour shared her interview with the Shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who admitted he was involved in encouraging the recent massive protests in Iran, resulting (Amanpour interjected) in a vicious crackdown by Khameni’s forces and many thousands being killed.
Whatever happens, I feel impelled to remind leaders what life was like under the Shah.
During the mid 1970s –before the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah—I visited Iran. I was sent there by the publisher of the English language, Beirut-based magazine, The Middle East Sketch, to write up a special issue on Iran as it celebrated its 2500 year anniversary of the Persian empire as part of the Shah’s so-called bloodless White Revolution, using Iran’s formidable oil wealth to rapidly modernize Iran. It would be a turning point in my young journalistic career.
I knew my publisher wanted a puff job that would bring in fabulous ad revenues. I could write what I wished as long as I didn’t criticize the regime. I knew that The BBC had recently been banned from Iran because it reported negatively on the Shah. So I had to be careful.
This is what I discovered:
When young people learned that I was an American journalist, they came up to me and pleaded with me to write the truth about life in Iran under the Shah.
They told me about the killing of young student protesters, including those who worked in a university chemistry lab that mysteriously exploded. They complained that the Shah and his sister, Princess Ashraf, smuggled drugs that were used to saturate the students’ meeting places to dull their political actions. With lower tones, they described a fire in a local cinema that killed everyone inside because the doors were locked.
I observed the Shah’s hated, black-suited secret police, SAVAK, lurking on street corners in Teheran, watching through dark glasses for the possibility of a disturbance. I put these observations into a file, “What Charlotte Couldn’t Write,” silently vowing to honor the students’ request.
When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, I rejoiced, not knowing that his reign of terror would soon be followed by the religious extremism of the Islamic Republic.
“What Charlotte Could Write”
The opportunity arose after Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Teheran in January 1979 and took 66 Americans hostage.
I followed the so-called “Hostage Crisis” with intense interest, and learned that some of the families whose loved ones were held in captivity began to question the official story put out by the U.S. State Department. As someone who had faced some stonewalling while investigating the death by plane crash of my diplomat/spy father, I felt a strong sense of empathy with one hostage family in particular.
Bonnie and Luzette Graves were the wife and daughter of John Graves, Public Affairs Officer at the US embassy. His posting to Iran was to try to improve relations with the new Iranian government that had overthrown the Shah. It was to be his last mission before retiring. Several months into the hostage taking, he sent his family a cryptic message in a letter: Watch out for Kissinger, Rockefeller, and Helms.” This warning sparked Mrs. Graves to do her own investigation, as she found it increasingly difficult to support the Administration’s handling of the crisis. Particularly galling was the State Department’s efforts, through the Family Liason Action Group (FLAG) to control what the hostage families knew, and what they said.
What got her and Luzette going was a 60 minutes expose on the Shah that aired on March 2, 1979. The segment, which the Carter Administration tried, unsuccessfully, to stop, detailed the Shah’s use of torture, his secret police collaboration with the C.I.A. and the intrigue which led to his admission into the U.S. for cancer treatment at the urging of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.
As I would write in a Nation cover story on the hostage families entitled Suffering in Silence ,the 60 Minutes program galvanized Bonnie and Luzette Graves to hold a press conference in their living room the following day. Before a flock of reporters they called for a Congressional investigation of American involvement in Iran and an apology from the Carter administration for past U.S schemes in Iran “It takes a strong nation to be able to say I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Graves. “What we need is a total re-examination of our foreign policy. We must cease our neo-colonialist activities that feed the fires that breed terrorism.”
Among those who responded was Republican Congressman George Hansen of Idaho, chairman of the House Banking Committee. who conducted two missions to Tehran and reported his findings to Congress.
The rest of the story
Shortly after the students seized the embassy, David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank encourage President Carter to freeze—and then seize–$ 8 billion worth of Iranian assets deposited in American banks. I wrote:
“Chase had handled up to $20 billion a year of Iranian oil revenues during the reign of the Shah, but by the summer of 1979, the Khomeini government had begun to withdraw large blocks of funds from Chase’s branches in Europe. Moreover, Chase had led an international consortium of banks in arranging up to $1.3 billion in loans to the Shah’s government in violation of the Shah’s own constitution and against the advice of Chase’s own lawyers in Teheran. Once the new revolutionary government came into power, it was within its legal right to challenge at any time the validity of those loans. Angry Chase shareholders might then feel obliged to file lawsuits against Chase for ignoring the advice of its lawyers.”
Here’s where John Graves’s warning began to make sense. I had read that the Teheran embassy warned President Carter that if he allowed the hated Shah into the U.S. for medical treatment, students would seize the embassy. Carter, bending to pressure from Rockefeller, Kissinger and (former US ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms) admitted him anyway. The embassy was attacked, and in response, the Iranian funds were seized. Bank crisis averted, while the hostages suffered 444 days in captivity,–until they were released on the day Ronald Reagan came into office. Currently, some tens of billions of dollars belonging to Iran have been frozen in bank accounts because of US sanctions
Final thoughts
I have always wondered whether the U.S. had any role in quietly supporting Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran’s new leader and have now found some evidence that it did. Washington’s post-Shah rationale centered on stopping Iran from falling into the Soviet orbit or into the hands of “communist sympathizers.” Notes the Guardian in its 2016 article: “Iranian leaders have reacted with fury to reports that newly declassified US diplomatic cables revealed extensive contacts between Ayatollah Khomeini and the Carter administration just weeks ahead of Iran’s Islamic revolution.”
But relations between the US and Iran have been rocky, to say the least. In the summer of 2025 Ttump threatened to eliminate the Supreme Ruler by declaring he knew where Khamenei’s was hiding “but we won’t kill you yet.” Meanwhile, news that the Shah’s son is ready to take over comes as no surprise.
Most humanitarian-minded people would welcome the end of over four decades of the Islamic Republic’s repressive theocratic regime. But will bringing back the Shah’s son make things better for the long-suffering Iranian people? I have my doubts.
This first appeared on Charlotte Dennet’s Substack page, Cui Bono?
Charlotte Dennett is an investigative journalist. Her most recent book, now out in paperback, is Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.
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