Through a Glass Darkly

In the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a State Department official summed up the confused state of American intelligence when he exclaimed, “Whoever took religion seriously?” Among the many intelligence failures leading up to the overthrow of the Shah—rivalry between competing agencies, unmerited “group-think” optimism about the Shah’s resilience, over-reliance on official intelligence channels, and the naive desire for America’s investment in Iran to pay off—the total disregard for Islam as a political force is perhaps the most egregious.