When Hamed, my Iranian college roommate, requested and got an Iranian roommate to replace me, I did not understand. It was the winter trimester of 1962 in Munich, and we had gotten through the fall trimester fine, I thought.
With my history major, I was studying under the sponsorship of a Wayne State University Junior Year in Munich program. It provided German-speaking tutors to supplement what we heard in lectures at the university.
Hamed was studying medicine. Our academic pursuits meant we rarely saw one another except in the evenings when we resided in a small bedroom with two beds and two desks and a common bathroom down the hall.
If we did talk, it was in German. He did not know English. I had no knowledge of Farsi and our conversation was strained. The Berlin Wall had been constructed the previous fall, so my interests focused on the Cold War.
Hamad would interrupt me by voicing his dislike of the shah, the autocrat who ruled Iran. Poorly informed, I did not know that nine years before my year in Munich, that the shah had been installed as Iran’s ruler by America’s Central Intelligence Agency. It happened in a coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, a democratically elected officeholder and initially pro-American.
Mossadegh had nationalized the British Petroleum-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. I was also unaware that Israel had been created out of Palestine as recently as 1948, a goal of European and American Jews. America and its European allies quickly recognized Israel as a sovereign nation. However, the post-colonial, vast world of Islam that included Iran, considered Israel an illegitimate, neo-colonialist venture.
President Eisenhower, becoming president in 1953, had initially opposed the coup, but Britain’s Winston Churchill, an unapologetic imperialist, reminded Eisenhower of British support for America’s war in Korea. Warned that Mosaddegh might be eclipsed by the Soviet Union’s meddling in Iranian politics, Eisenhower eventually OK’d the coup. The CIA succeeded. The USA won itself a puppet government led by the shah.
My Iranian roommate and his fellow Iranian students hated the shah. They regarded him as a vestige of 19th century imperialism in which Iran had existed subject to the whims of the British Empire. After the coup, the United States replaced Britain in their eyes. My roommate called the shah “our blood.” The term referred to the Shah’s crushing of dissent by imprisonment and torture. The SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police force, had been trained by the CIA. My roommate, probably fed up with my ignorance, replaced me with an Iranian roommate.
In 1979, the Iranian people overthrew the Shah. I wondered what my former Iranian roommate was thinking. There were many anti-American options. The Islamic Right, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, crushed them all and created the Islamic Republic, a semi-democratic theocracy that has ruled Iran for the last 47 years. It calls America “the great Satan” and it aims for the destruction of Israel.
Efforts by the Obama administration to open a dialogue with Iran were terminated by President Trump during Trump’s first term. In his second term, Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025 and Israel’s recent killing of many of Iran’s leaders indicate Trump and Israel prefer regime change, but what kind of change is possible? It has been many years since my Munich days. My former Iranian roommate might no longer be alive, but if he is, I wonder what he is thinking?
David E. Dix is a former publisher of The Record-Courier.
This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Iran war brings thoughts of 1962 roomie, hatred of Shah | David Dix
Reporting by David E. Dix, Special to The Record-Courier / Record-Courier
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