Word: shahs
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First, the Shah is no longer a boy-king. He is a proud and imperious monarch of 59 who expects to be both addressed and treated as His Imperial Majesty. He takes orders from no one: not the U.S. ambassador, not the U.S. President. That rules out Washington's ability to tell him what he must do to survive, even if the U.S. had known what to tell him early enough...
...does there appear to have been so little thought given even to contingency planning? One well-informed U.S. Government source says that as far as he knows there has been no paper that went through normal Government clearance procedures addressing the question of what to do if the Shah should fall. How can this...
Part of the answer is that only in recent weeks has Washington taken seriously the possibility of the Shah's falling. It has long been a basic tenet of American policy that the Shah must be strong; the wishful thinking of policymakers contaminated the judgment of those who collected and analyzed intelligence. American officials tended to rely on Iranian intelligence, which in turn tended to tell His Imperial Majesty what he wanted to hear...
Once it became clear to all the world that the Shah was in deep trouble, why did the foreign policy and national security bureaucracies not then start grinding out options for what to do if he should fall...
...want to be told what to do 'if.' They wanted to be told 'if' wasn't going to happen, and they wanted us to concentrate on making sure it didn't happen." Or as another official puts it, "The support-the-Shah-to-the-hilt policy limited discussion of other options...