Paper Trail

Location: US Embassy, Tehran

Years: 1977–79

Lesson: Dangers of Western Self-Delusion

The story of the embassy shredder is one of those indispensable cliches — anecdotes so revealing that they are endlessly retold because they’re never bettered.

When revolutionary students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 — triggering the Iran hostage crisis — they found sacks of classified CIA documents that had been shredded by fleeing US diplomats.

Students discovered that the strips were still readable. Volunteers — some said to have experience in carpet weaving — sat for hours painstakingly piecing together the paper ribbons. Piece by piece, the cables were reconstructed and eventually published in dozens of volumes under the title, Documents from the US Espionage Den.

The intel haul led to the invention of a genuinely secure shredder. But beyond the minutiae of corporate waste disposal, it revealed how blind America and the West had been about how rotten the Shah’s regime had been.

Two years earlier, in December 1977, President Jimmy Carter had stood beside the Shah and toasted Iran as an “island of stability.” In retrospect, that seems ludicrous, but in real time that was the widely held view. Unrest was manageable, the Shah’s security services were formidable, and the clerics — led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from his Parisian exile — seemed marginal.

Even in mid-1978, as oil strikes paralyzed the Iranian economy and millions marched, intelligence assessments insisted Iran was not in a revolutionary situation. The Shah, it was believed, would rule for years.

The American failure was one of wishful thinking. Western observers saw highways, universities, a Westernized elite — and assumed these were stand-ins for broader society. But in reality, Iran was deeply riven between reformists and traditionalists who were troubled by the Shah’s secularism.

The Shah fell because he was unpopular, and the West missed it because it was self-deluded.

Iconic Images

location: Mehrabad International Airport

Years: 1979

Lesson: Red-Green Alliance

Two famous photos taken within weeks of each other at the same location capture the shocking rise of the Iran’s theocratic regime. The first taken on January 16, 1979, shows the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on the tarmac, leaving Iran officially for a vacation — but in fact never to return. The Shah looks fragile. A uniformed officer bends to kiss his shoe. It’s one last scene of imperial fealty as the Shah’s authority collapses.

Two weeks later, the last vestiges of that secular, Western-oriented regime are gone. On February 1, 1979, a representative of Iran’s medieval past sweeps in to the same airport. Exiled for years, but wildly popular inside Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini descends the steps of an Air France jet, unsmiling and severe.

Around him is the choreography of a modern state — airport security, press photographers, Western aircraft — ushering in a man who has succeeded in rolling back modernity.

A third Associated Press image taken elsewhere is the most revealing. Khomeini stands surrounded by a few black- and brown-robed clerics — and beyond them, a sea of arms raised in acclaim. Many of the men are clean-shaven, Western-dressed. The contrast of religion and modernity highlights the fact that Khomeini’s revolt rested on a broad-based coalition.

Exiled in France, Khomeini’s speeches were recorded on cassette tapes and smuggled into Iran. Hundreds of thousands of copies circulated; millions listened.

His message was politically savvy, pitches to appeal to a broad anti-Shah coalition. To the urban religious poor and rural traditionalists, he invoked Shiite opposition to decades of enforced secularization. To the bazaar merchants, he promised moral order and protection from the Shah’s crony capitalism.

Khomeini made a wily play for support from students and leftists, as well. He borrowed the language of anti-imperialism to gain their support.

That message appealed to leftists and liberals in the West, who saw in the brown-robed firebrand an unlikely ally in the crusade against American hegemony.

Khomeini’s supporters were an early manifestation of the Red-Green alliance of Islamists and left-wingers that is now the defining feature of the global left.

American Democrats and British Labour Party politicians who howl in support of Gaza alongside pro-Hamas extremists are following a playbook written by Khomeini in the late 1970s.

Saved by the Bell

location: Tehran

Years: 1979

Lesson: Caught Napping

For Israel, the Shah’s collapse was a strategic earthquake. Before 1979, Israel and Iran had enjoyed a quiet but mutually-beneficial partnership. Officially, Tehran did not recognize the Jewish state. Unofficially, the relationship ran deep. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi saw Israel as a bulwark against Arab nationalists and Soviet power.

At the intelligence level, Mossad and SAVAK — the Shah’s secret police — worked together. The partnership was also economic. The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, a discreet joint venture, transported Iranian oil to the Mediterranean, bypassing the Suez Canal and providing Israel with both energy security and strategic depth.

There were arms sales, military advising, agricultural missions, infrastructure projects — often conducted quietly or through intermediaries.

In the Shah’s final years, as President Jimmy Carter increased pressure on Tehran over human rights, the Shah leaned more heavily on Israel. Concerned about the reliability of his Western supply lines, he turned to a partner less inclined to moral lectures. Advanced military projects were underway — ambitious ones. According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, joint initiatives included sophisticated missile cooperation, advanced aircraft development, and exploratory nuclear-related discussions.

Then the revolution accelerated. The hard-bitten Israelis — less susceptible to flights of liberal fancy than Carter’s people — weren’t caught napping as much as they were caught on the hop.

Even after the Shah had left the country, his security chief assured the Israelis that when the ayatollah flew into Tehran, he would be dealt with.

While shocking at the time, in retrospect, the speed of the Shah’s fall was providential.

Had the Shah’s regime limped on for another few years, Israel might eventually have confronted an Iran equipped with advanced jets, ballistic missiles, and ever nuclear weapons — all provided by Israel itself.

Painful Cure

Location: Tehran

Years: Mid-1970s

Lesson: Jewish Renaissance

When the Shah fled in January 1979, many Iranian Jews did not panic. The monarchy had wobbled in the past and recovered. For a wealthy, assimilated community with a secure place among the Iranian elite, their ancient homeland was the future.

The signal that the Islamists meant business was the shocking arrest and execution of Habib Elghanian, the head of the Jewish community and one of Iran’s most prominent businessmen.

Almost overnight, the social atmosphere shifted. Antisemitism spiked and in a reversion to the Persian past, Jews were treated as untouchables.

As a mass stampede for the exits began, one route already existed: to Baltimore’s Yeshivas Ner Yisroel.

In the words of Yonason Rosenblum in his biography of Rabbi Moshe Sherer: “Hashem, our Sages tell us (Megillah 13b), puts in place the cure before He brings the disease, but rarely has this been so clear as in the case of Iranian Jewry.”

The story, my Mishpacha colleague explains, began in the mid-1970s, when Rabbi Naftoli Neuberger of Ner Yisroel received a call from Rabbi Yosef Leib Schuchatowitz, head of the Otzar Hatorah institutions in Iran.

Under the Shah’s modernization drive and in an attempt to curb the growth of religious fundamentalism in the country, private religious schooling was under threat. Jewish schooling was set to be collateral damage of the campaign against Islamism.

Rabbi Neuberger traveled to Iran to negotiate a Jewish exemption. While there, he observed the weakness of Jewish religious life in the country, and so he developed the bold idea of bringing a small group of Iranian young men to America for yeshivah, with the intention that they would return home to strengthen their communities.

The first group arrived at Ner Yisroel in 1977, and a second followed in 1978. When the Iran-Iraq War erupted in September 1980 — a conflict in which children were sent unarmed to clear minefields — the rescue effort ramped up. Rabbi Moshe Sherer expanded the use of humanitarian parole provisions in American immigration law.

The network widened as well. Ner Yisroel in Baltimore absorbed young men. Chabad facilitated thousands of child entries, and Jewish Federations provided funding.

For the dwindling Jewish community who chose to continue living under the shadow of the ayatollahs in Iran, life has often been precarious.

But for the bulk of Iranian Jews, what began as a limited educational initiative became broad-based rescue that brought an ancient Jewish community back to its roots.

Hated Allies

Location: Jerusalem / Tehran

Years: 1980s

Lesson: Dirty Hands, Dirty War

Quite incredibly, while Iranian Jews were being spirited out of the country at exorbitant cost to their rescuers, hundreds of Israelis were living in Tehran under the protection of the new revolutionary regime.

That’s because through much of the 1980s, Israel supped with the devil by arming the Islamic Republic.

The logic was cold and strategic. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, Iraq — not Iran — was Jerusalem’s immediate nightmare. In hindsight, Saddam is remembered as the disheveled fugitive pulled from a drainpipe by Coalition forces in 2003 and later hanged. In real time, he was a heavily armed aggressor who had already fired Scuds at Israel and was pursuing nuclear capability.

So, from 1981 onward, Israeli weapons, spare parts and ammunition — much of it originally American-made — flowed to Tehran. Payment came largely in oil. Iran’s US-built air force, crippled by sanctions after the revolution, remained operational in significant part because Israeli technicians and spare parts kept it flying.

The operation was vast and improvised. Weapons transited through Cyprus, Turkey, Europe, Latin America. Captured PLO weaponry from the 1982 Lebanon war reportedly found its way to Iranian stockpiles. Israeli advisers quietly assisted with maintenance and battlefield problems — even as Iranian crowds publicly chanted “Death to Israel.”

By the mid-1980s, this shadow cooperation intersected with American policy in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Israel acted as intermediary in US arms shipments to Tehran. The rationale was consistent: prevent Iraq from winning, preserve influence within Iran, and open channels to factions thought to be pragmatic.

In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, reportedly using information supplied by Iranian intelligence. Throughout the 1980s, official Iran castigated America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan.

Behind the scenes, the ayatollahs were only too glad to avail themselves of satanic knowhow.

Expansion Plan

Location: Shiite Crescent

Years: 1989

Lesson: Extremism Grows

In another life, Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, might have been a successful entrepreneur. Born in 1939, he was a follower of Khomeinism before the revolution, and occupied senior posts within the revolutionary government, before bagging the top job.

From the moment that he assumed power, those entrepreneurial instincts were deployed in expanding Iran’s footprint.

The Iran-Iraq War had already forged the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) into a parallel army. But under Khamenei, the Guards became something far more ambitious: the spine of a regional strategy that became the Shi’ite Crescent. This was an arc of alliance from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut.

Under Iranian tutelage, Lebanon’s Hezbollah evolved into a terror army with more fire power and combat experience than many states. In Iraq after 2003, Iranian-backed Shiite militias were nurtured, funded, and gradually folded into state structures. In Syria, when Bashar al-Assad’s regime tottered, Iranian officers and proxy fighters ensured it did not fall. In Yemen, the Houthis became another pressure point against Saudi Arabia and Western shipping lanes.

Under Khamenei, proxy warfare became not a tactic but doctrine. By the mid-2010s, Iran possessed influence in four Arab capitals — Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sanaa — something no Persian ruler had achieved in centuries.

Khamenei understood something else: Revolutions need revenue. Under his leadership, the IRGC evolved into an economic colossus with interests in construction, energy, telecommunications, banking, ports, and infrastructure.

The result was the evolution of the IRGC into a hybrid organism: part army, part intelligence service, part conglomerate — all operating under Khamenei.

Export Business

Location: Buenos Aires

Years: 1994

Lesson: Terror without borders

On a winter morning, July 18, 1994, a Renault van packed with explosives detonated outside the AMIA Jewish community center in Bueno Aires. The blast sheared off the building’s façade, pancaked floors into one another, and left 85 people dead beneath the rubble — clerks, students, pensioners who had come to file paperwork or attend meetings.

In the aftermath of the deadliest attack on a Jewish institution since the Holocaust, sirens and dust filled the street; rescuers clawed through debris for survivors.

The bumbling nature of the Argentine investigation was part lack of local law enforcement professionalism, part intentional foot-dragging. It was politically inconvenient to look too closely at what had happened.

The politically-radioactive nature of the terror plot was exposed decades later in 2015, when investigator Alberto Nisman accused President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of attempting to cover up Iranian involvement in exchange for improved trade relations. Days later, he was found dead in his apartment from a gunshot wound — initially ruled a suicide, later investigated as a homicide.

In the aftermath of the AMIA bombing, investigators would later accuse senior Iranian officials and operatives linked to Hezbollah of orchestrating the attack, a charge Tehran denied.

According to Ronen Bergman, chronicler of the Israel-Iran shadow war, the attack was a response to a Mossad-led operation that had crippled Iran’s finances.

“Operation Knock on the Door” came at a critical time for Iran in Khamenei’s early years. Massive borrowing that had financed Iran’s war with Iraq came due in 1993, and Tehran wanted to refinance the debt in European capitals.

“Like a good Persian bazaar merchant, the head of Iran’s central bank cleverly manipulated the different European states,” writes Bergman in The Secret War with Iran, telling the one that the other had offered him better terms, and hoping in this way to maximize profits.”

Using back channels, Israel told Iran that it would expose the subterfuge to the Europeans if Iran didn’t release air force navigator Ron Arad, who had been in Iranian captivity since 1986.

When Iran failed to take the tradeoff, Israel cashed in its chips. Informed of the trick, the Europeans negotiated tougher loan terms with the Iranians who had to swallow massive financial losses.

Months later, the Iranians struck.

The AMIA bombing was to establish a pattern for Iranian belligerence under Khamenei. The same architecture — ideological sponsorship from Tehran, operational execution through deniable intermediaries, financing routed through transnational networks — that operated in the Shi’ite Crescent crossed the Atlantic.

As the 1990s went on, the Iranians grew bolder. Local affiliates shipped explosives and arranged attacks across Europe and Asia — some of them foiled, some of them successful.

The ongoing failure of European governments to ban Iranian proxies like Hezbollah taught Khamenei that when it was kept at arm’s-length, terror simply cowed the West.

Peak Deterrence

Location: United Nations

Year: 2013

Lesson: Obama Picks Iran

The proof of Khamenei’s pudding — testament to the success of his long-term strategy — was President Obama’s pivot toward Iran.

Announced in a General Assembly address in September 2013, it became official US policy as the JCPOA, or Iran Deal in 2015. At its heart, the agreement was more than a deal over nuclear weapons. It also represented Obama’s view that decades of US hostility to Tehran had failed, because Iran was simply too powerful an adversary to be bested. Hence, the necessity for diching Israel and traditional Gulf allies in favor of Iran. In other words, vindication for Khamenei’s uncompromising proxy strategy.

In a sense, Obama was correct. Decades of American promises to stop the Iranian march to a bomb were proven hollow by the failure to act at every step.

But Obama wasn’t just engaged in an exercise in realpolitik — there was an ideological component to it as well. His overtures to Iran were a very conscious attempt to distance the United States from Israel.

Bitterly opposed by Israel under Bibi Netanyahu, the Iran Deal’s contentious passage opened a yawning gap between Israel and America where previously both allies had sought to keep public daylight under wraps.

It accelerated the demise of traditional Democratic support for Israel — much to the delight of Khamenei and his army of Jew-hating terror proxies.

As President Obama left the White House, Israel was hobbled, Khamenei rampant, and America seemed well and truly deterred.

Mortal Combat

Location: Baghdad Airport

Year: 2020

Lesson: No More Containment

Enter Donald Trump. The election of the real estate mogul from New York inaugurated a partnership that rocked the Iranians back on their heels. Trump fired a shot across the bows in 2018 by withdrawing the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement, despite European objections. That move signaled a broader rethink of containment strategies.

For decades, the United States treated Iran as a problem to be managed. Sanctions, negotiations, indirect confrontation — but never direct blows against the regime’s inner circle.

The change was evident in the increasing boldness of Israel’s campaign against Iran. In 2018, the Mossad snatched the Iranian nuclear archive in a brazen heist.

Then America itself acted. On January 3, 2020, a US drone strike near Baghdad airport killed Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force — the architect of Iran’s regional empire.

To the world this announced loud and clear that Trump was different: He drew red lines and kept them.

Brothers in Arms

Location: B2 mission

Year: 2025

Lesson: America’s Fight

Fast forward to Trump’s second term, and the Bibi-Trump alliance has ramped up to previously unseen levels. This is no Nixonian weapons airlift in 1973; no Bush-era order to Israel to sit out the Gulf War. It wasn’t even Joe Biden’s urging of Bibi to hold back retaliation against Iranian missile attacks post-October 7.

The full meaning of Trump ordering B2 stealth bombers into action to complete Israel’s 12 Day War last June, was the revelation that Bibi and Trump are acting in concert over the Iranian threat.

To all intents and purposes, Israel’s fight was now America’s as far as Trump is concerned.

In the same way that America’s real entry into World War II was the decision to send a few old ships to Churchill’s Britain long before Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor, the act of knocking out the Fordow reactors was never likely to be limited to the nuclear file alone.

No Return

Location: Central Tehran

Years: 2026

Lesson: Regime Change

The sirens that rang out over a crisp early Shabbos morning in Israel startled many people, but shocked very few.

With renewed war in the air for weeks, it was mostly a question of when, not if. As an American aerial and naval armada assembled in the Middle East, it grew ever harder to sustain the idea that President Trump was prepared to walk away with just another nuclear deal to show for his efforts.

For Israel, the reality is simple. As the rain of death from Iranian missiles highlights, the only way forward is the end of the Khomeinist regime’s reign of terror.

For America, this represents the biggest roll of the dice yet from Trump. With Khamenei himself dead, the allure of dealing the death blow to his regime lies in the payoff.

At a stroke, the world’s largest exporter of terror — anchor of an anti-US coalition — would turn peaceful. That, in turn, could deal a double blow to China and Russia. By allowing the US to draw down its forces in the Gulf, American power would grow elsewhere, and the China-led axis of troublemakers deprived of a leading member.

In a world where striking foreign policy wins are hard to come by, that calculation will have appealed to Trump’s taste for dramatic action with outsize consequences.

The trouble is that the list of previous wars won through air strikes alone is worryingly short — arguably only one item long, in fact.

Stretching back to the dawn of air warfare, only NATO’s 1999 Kosovo strikes led to the intended result.

In all other cases, boots on the ground in the shape of an invasion and occupation force are the only sure way to change an enemy government. But if there’s one thing that’s entirely alien to the Trumpian way of war, it’s committing American troops to Middle Eastern quagmires.

That’s why Trump’s regime change strategy rests on an Iranian uprising. Announcing the war — which began with an Israeli decapitation strike against Ayatollah Khamenei and his leadership — Trump urged the Iranian people to rise up.

It’s hard to believe that Bibi and Trump have waltzed into war based on the vague notion of an Iranian popular uprising and with no alternative leadership on the ground already.

It’s possible that — as was the case with the Maduro operation — a backchannel exists to regime elements willing to throw Khamenei over as they make a bid for leadership.

But stranger things have happened to US foreign policy than rushing into action with a half-baked plan.

And this is where things could quickly go wrong for the American-Israeli coalition. Because if the smoke clears over Iran after days of airstrikes and some semblance of the regime remains in control, the regime wins.

If that happens, then the anti-Israel coalition of antisemites and isolationists will roar back with renewed force. The Tucker Carlsons of the world will fill the airwaves with depictions of Bibi as the Judas figure who lured a naïve American president — yet again — into a war that the United States didn’t need.

Carlson and Co would be wrong. It was Trump himself who — riding high having audaciously snatched Maduro — talked himself into a corner by vowing to help the Iranian protesters.

So, as Israelis run for the shelters again, pondering the wonders of a war in which modern Persia overlaps with the Purim story, the die is cast.

For Bibi and Trump, there is no going back on the regime change effort. Bibi, because his country has nowhere else to go. And Trump, because his dreams of redrawing the map of the Middle East with a new Iran at the center have passed the point of no return.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1102)