I Was a Prisoner in Iran. I’ve Seen the US Meddle in the Region for Decades

In February 1984, I was a death row prisoner at Evin Prison in Tehran when Saddam Hussein began his first systematic campaign of bombardment of Iranian cities. At the time, I was alone in an infirmary cell, weak with advanced lymphoma. The ward was particularly quiet. Occasionally, the distant moaning of a prisoner in another cell broke the stabbing silence of the infirmary. The roaring sound of missiles shaking the city further complicated the purgatory of waiting for execution, while fading from my untreated cancer.

Every evening for almost two weeks, I sat on my bed trying to devise a plan for when the missiles hit the prison. Do I run toward the nearest exit? What if the guards shoot indiscriminately at escaping prisoners? Do I crawl under my bed to save myself from the debris? Do I just lie calmly on my bed and accept the inevitable?

One evening, a guard who noticed my anxiety assured me that the missiles were not going to hit the prison. “If they do, we all go together, that’s the only thing we have in common,” he said mockingly. Usually, he was not very chatty. He was in charge of tending to a deep wound on my neck and seldom uttered a word as he changed its bandage every other day. He did his job reluctantly and made sure that I knew of his ambivalence by reminding me that I was going to be executed anyway—why bother.

In a twisted way, the bombings forced both of us to transcend our positions: the possibility of being buried under the same wreckage could bring fleeting moments of solidarity. He told me about his tours of the warfront in the south and how he never got used to seeing torn-apart bodies of those who fought to fend off the Iraqi aggression. He held back the flow of sorrow with a rattled smile as he named among those, “my younger brother, who’s now in the heavens.” He quickly became conscious of the theatre of the absurd we shared. Here were the confessions of a prison guard to a death row prisoner accused of the plot to overthrow the very government he was guarding.

I was arrested three years earlier for membership in a radical Marxist organization that intended to topple the Islamic Republic. I was tried and sentenced to death four months after my arrest and had been waiting since for the sentence to be carried out. After a year on death row, I developed cancer, which had remained untreated for several months until it advanced to what the prison officials believed to be a terminal stage.

After the initial shock of hearing and feeling the impact of the Iraqi bombs in the city, I felt a deep sense of resignation. I had no doubts that I would die soon, either from cancer or by firing squad. My acquiescence, lying in bed without any appearance of outrage, was an expression of futility, nothing more. But it gave the guards the impression that I welcomed Saddam Hussein’s attacks and that a possible destruction of Evin Prison could offer me a chance to survive. Far from it, I knew at the time that Saddam Hussein’s aggression was primarily an attempt to take advantage of the instability after the revolution to expand the Iraqi territories and appropriate Iranian oil fields. Although my other comrades and I were on the losing side of the post-revolutionary power struggle, I remained faithful to the ideals of the revolution and the emancipatory politics that gave rise to it.

Iraqi forces had invaded a large swath southwest of Iran in a surprise attack at the end of the summer of 1980. After two years of bloody battle, the Iranian side regained control of its territory. Suffering crushing losses on the warfronts, Saddam Hussein began to attack major cities, including Tehran, to disrupt Iranian morale and compel the people to overthrow their own government in order to end the war. In two weeks, from February 7 to February 22, 1984, Iraqi bombs and missiles killed more than 4,700 and wounded over 20,000 civilians. Iran retaliated in kind.

At the time, Iraq was a client state of the Soviet Union. The Soviets were the main supplier of arms and munition to Iraq; their air raids were carried out with Soviet-made jet fighters. Although the Cold War was still at its height, the United States and other NATO members saw in the Iraqi aggression an opportunity to contain the Iranian revolution and a chance for lucrative arms deals. The French offered Saddam Hussein their Mirage-F1 fighter jets to combat Iranian F-14 Tomcats. German companies transferred tons of material for use in chemical weapons that Saddam deployed against civilians using American-made Bell helicopters. In addition to intelligence sharing, the Ronald Reagan administration provided the Iraqi regime with billions of dollars of economic aid, preventing the total collapse of their economy.

My fear of being buried under Evin Prison rubble did not materialize. Evin was not bombed at that time. After eight years and hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, millions of people displaced, economies in ruins, in 1988, a peace treaty was signed between Iran and Iraq. The war ended, but the US project of containing Iran and remapping the Middle East persisted. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the American patience for any form of challenge to its hegemony in the emerging unipolar world order dwindled.

The response to the 9/11 attacks demonstrated how far Washington will go to display its unmatched military might and its willingness to execute disproportionate power against perceived enemies. Iran remained on top of the target list. One week before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I was invited to Washington, DC, for a workshop on Iran policy. I, now a professor of sociology, thought that the purpose of the workshop was to find a way to avoid the spread of war to Iran. But the meeting with a small group of State Department and Congressional staff was about how fast the US forces could march to Tehran after conquering Baghdad.

The Islamic Republic learned quickly that, in addition to a repressive rule, its existence depended on creating a ring of fire around its borders as a deterrent to the American and Israeli ambitions to redraw the map of the region. More than the evidence of its expansionist project, the Islamic Republic’s investment in the Lebanese Hezbollah, support of the al-Assad regime in Syria, and defending of the Palestinian cause had to do with its own security. That is not to say that they did not have ideological convictions against American hegemony and Israel’s largely unchecked reign in the region. But, as Henry Precht, the former director of the Iran desk at the State Department, aptly observed in 1988, what motivates the Islamic Republic is “political and economic independence at home, not dominion abroad.”

On June 23, 2025, amid the horrors of another imposed war on Iran, I had the uncanny experience of watching the news from my home in New York City when the Israeli forces bombed Evin Prison in northern Tehran. What I feared more than forty years ago had finally happened. How perplexing that I felt that my home was attacked. That visceral reaction stayed with me for several days. As the news continued to come out, we learned that seventy-nine people were killed, most of whom were prison employees, including social workers and legal staff, as well as many people who were there to visit their imprisoned loved ones. The news also came out that, rather than running away, many prisoners rushed toward where the bombs had landed to rescue those under the rubble, among them, a number of interrogators, staff of the prosecutor’s office, and medical staff at the infirmary.

Ten days earlier, Israel had launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, assassinating top commanders of the Iranian military and launching bombs and missiles at Tehran and other major cities. They killed more than 1,000 people and wounded thousands more during a twelve-day campaign aimed at destroying Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and with the ostensible expectation that, as a result of the bombing, Iranians would rise up and overthrow the Islamic Republic. After the initial blow, the government organized a massive response, showering Israeli cities with homemade missiles, some of which were able to penetrate the seemingly invincible Iron Dome.

For more than thirty years, Israeli leadership had been claiming that Iran is just a few months away from making a nuclear bomb. In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a non-ranking member of the Knesset, warned that Tehran was only a few years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb, a claim that he repeated in his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism. In his infamous UN General Assembly speech in September 2012, equipped with a cartoonish graph, he warned the world that Iran was on the threshold of making and deploying a nuclear bomb. “By next spring . . . they will be ready to move on to the final stage.”

Israel’s attack on Iran was in the making for decades (and had enjoyed several mini-rehearsals). So was the Islamic Republic’s response. Nearly since it came to power, the Islamic Republic has justified its repressive policies and the limits it imposes on civil liberties as necessary measures to check the external threats against its existence. Western observers often frame the formation of the Iranian security state as a reflection of the chronic paranoia of Ayatollah Khamenei, the late supreme leader. It seems baffling that after decades of overt and covert Israeli operations inside Iran, including sabotage, assassination, cyberattacks, and espionage, the mainstream media characterizes the Iranian leadership as overly suspicious.

The day before Israel’s initial attack, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called for an emergency meeting in Vienna to report that Iran was in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards. Contrary to American media headlines, the IAEA report contained no new information or any evidence of Iran’s non-compliance or any weaponization program. Instead, it highlighted the agency’s dissatisfaction with a decades-old event. The report pointed to Iran’s 2003 response to questions about the military component of its program and the discovery of additional highly enriched particles of uranium in three sites at that time. Although Rafael Grossi, the IAEA director, clearly stated that there was no evidence of a weaponization program and consistent monitoring had taken place in the twenty years since, he raised suspicions about Iran’s transparency and good faith.

The IAEA meeting in Vienna took place after the Israeli government had already informed the US and European allies that an attack on Iran was imminent. Before the IAEA submitted its report in the meeting, the plans were drawn, the support was pledged, and the light had turned green for the Israelis to obliterate Iranian nuclear sites and vital infrastructure regardless of the substantial human toll.

At the time, Iran and the US were in the middle of negotiating a new agreement on the limits and the scope of the Iranian enrichment program. The two sides had met five times in Oman and Italy. They were supposed to meet again in Oman in two days when Israel attacked Iranian cities. Like the international coalition that sustained Saddam Hussein’s war of aggression, Israel launched its attack with the help of the US and its allies. American tanker aircraft took off from a military base in Qatar to deliver aerial refuelling to the Israeli jet fighters whose range would otherwise not allow them to reach Iranian targets. While the British and the Americans stockpiled billions of dollars of arms in Israel, the French helped Israel to intercept Iranian retaliatory missiles, and Jordan and Iraq were pressured to open their respective airspace to the Israelis to carry out their attacks.

Many Iranian dissidents in exile held the Islamic Republic responsible for the war. They ranged from those who dream of the return of the pre-revolution Pahlavi monarchy to those who hoped for a democratic transformation of the existing political order that could accommodate the US interests in the region. The monarchists understand that the key issue in reclaiming Iran’s position in the region is the question of sovereignty. In no uncertain terms, Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah’s son, has situated himself as an ally of the US and Israel, even more so during the war. The monarchists know that the US needs a client state in Iran and they intend to prove that they are the best alternative to fulfill that mandate.

Within Iran, the situation was not so straightforward. Many who scorn and distrust their government nonetheless see Israel clearly and do not welcome its violent interference. How could an increasingly theocratic state in Israel, with its Biblical claim to land and statehood, along with authoritarian regimes, like Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other American allies in the Middle East, demand a secular-democratic Iran as the solution to the existing conflict? Those dissidents who believe that a democratic and secular Iran would ease tensions with the West fail to see how the US and its allies instrumentalize human rights and civil liberties as a means of expanding their influence around the world, while giving themselves a pass on atrocities—a fact that has become even clearer two plus years into the Gaza genocide.

The majority of Americans believe that the US is a benevolent force for good and that it has the moral authority to lead the rest of the world toward a better future. Many Iranian dissidents subscribe to this American myth, in a sharp departure from the anti-imperialist position of those who led and participated in the revolutionary movement of the 1970s. At the time, for Iranian revolutionaries, what happened in Vietnam and Cambodia, in Indonesia and East Timor, in Palestine, in Africa—from Algeria to South Africa—and in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cuba were all relevant to their struggle against the tyranny of the Shah and his regime’s proxy exercise of military might on behalf of American interests in the Middle East.

Mohammad Reza Shah, the second monarch of the Pahlavis, was himself an instance of the American containment policy in the Middle East. Most often, the story that is told about the US–Iran relations begins with the hostage crisis of 1979. But I came of age in Iran in the 1970s, when people of my generation, and the generation before me, could not think of the US without recalling the 1953 joint Central Intelligence Agency–MI6 coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected prime minister who nationalized the oil industry. At that time, Iranians were acutely aware that they did not have any input in the management of the Anglo-Iranian oil company and no right to audit its books. Iran’s revenue share from its own precious national resource was less than 20 percent. The oil workers were paid fifty cents a day with no sick time, vacation, compensation for disability, or any pension programs.

Amid rising nationalist sentiment and anti-imperialist liberation movements around the world, the Iranian prime minister believed that the demand for a fair share of the nation’s natural resources would find a receptive audience, even in the US. He was mistaken. Informed by a Cold War outlook that only tyrannical regimes could impede the spread of communism, the US decided that the liberal Mosaddeq lacked the necessary backbone to run the country with the iron fist required to curb Soviet expansionism. The coup that ousted Mosaddeq in the summer of 1953 was the most consequential CIA covert operation, code-named Operation Ajax.

At the time, Iran served as one of the strongest footholds of American interests around the world. Its location in the Middle East, particularly when the settler-colonial state of Israel was in its infancy, made Iran a strategic outpost that the West could not afford to lose. Mosaddeq’s resolve in defending Iran’s sovereignty and the nationwide popular support that backed his project forced the Shah to leave the country. With the coup, the CIA brought Mohammad Reza Shah back from Rome and reinstalled him to the throne. Under his royal tutelage, the country became a perfect client state and, in the process, earned the nickname the “gendarme of the region.” He ruled Iran for another twenty-five years after the coup, years that are known in the Iranian political lexicon as the dark ages of despotism.

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In 1985, after the High Judicial Council annulled my death sentence, I was granted a medical parole. I managed to leave the country a few months later and was treated at Stanford University Hospital with aggressive chemotherapy. I returned to school and became a scholar of political events and the historical moment that shaped my earlier life. I have been writing about the Iranian revolution and its consequences—domestic, regional, and global—for more than three decades. In the nearly half-century since the 1979 revolution, there have been jubilant moments of hope in the country and long periods of despair and disillusionment. Iran has been through an eight-year war with Iraq, years of armed struggle by Kurdish separatists, and plenty of domestic social strife. Thousands were executed, imprisoned, or maimed by the regime during the first decade of its rule.

One of the main opposition groups, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), assassinated hundreds of government officials and later joined the Iraqi forces during the war to topple the Islamic Republic. Iran has also seen swings between periods of reform and the expansion of civil society, all the while sustained by a repressive state apparatus that has thus far maintained a tight grip on political power.

The United States has gone through eight presidencies since President Jimmy Carter was ousted over his failure to return the embassy hostages; a failure that was choreographed by the Reagan campaign team to make sure that the hostages remained in Iran until after the presidential election of 1980. Since then, there have been periods of rapprochement, followed by increasing hostility and a continuous series of crushing sanctions that have taken a terrible toll on Iranians of all walks of life. We’ve seen a War on Terror and the labelling of Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil,” followed by one president’s attempts to sign a nuclear agreement with Iran—only to see that same agreement ripped up by another president, who spoke about wanting to strike a new deal even as he witnessed the Israeli assassination of one of the lead Iranian negotiators. All this came after he imposed the most draconian economic sanctions in recent history on the country.

Despite major events in the past four decades, the neo-colonial power structure remains an enduring problem that continues to shape the political landscape of the Middle East. Central to the existing political order are two basic questions around which American strategic interests are articulated. These are—in alternating orders of significance—the question of Palestine and of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has exercised its own sovereign power to extend its regional political authority. The enduring question of the past four decades is Iran’s sovereignty, its refusal to become a client state aligned with American interests in the region. The United States and its European allies instrumentalize the Islamic Republic’s repressive state apparatus, its appalling violations of human rights, patriarchal legal system, and its limitations on civil liberties to justify their attempts to force Iran to submit to their demands. The fact that the most reliable allies of the Western powers in the region (i.e., Saudi Arabia and Egypt) have atrocious records of naked despotism and brutal governance is a clear indication that the protection of human rights and dignity does not drive American interests in the region, regardless of the lip service they are given when directed at Iran.

We have reached a point when nothing seems to shock us. All kinds of disasters, hurricanes, fires, floods, droughts, mass migrations, and even genocidal wars have become normalized events of our time. In so many ways, even the pretense of accountability no longer exists. In 2016, when Donald Trump was running for his first presidency, he declared that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” That was the moment Trump signalled that he would usher the US into a new era of brazen disregard for formal rules of governance and a flagrant contempt for accountability. Trump transformed the language of brutality, rape, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny into an open element of normative political discourse, and he continues to do so as the forty-seventh President of the United States. The powerful will stay mighty so long as the legitimacy of their acts remains unquestioned and their authority uncontested.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions by Behrooz Gamari, published by OR Books, 2026.