So... The real problem here is this is an excerpt utterly without context. The book in question isn't about Iran. The people being talked about aren't the subject of the biography. This blivet here is sort of like reading some random reference to Radegast in the Simarillon or however you say it and thinking it's representative of Lord of the Rings. The book it's excerpted from is about the South Asia station chief in Lebanon. He was kidnapped by Hezbollah and died of kidney failure in captivity. Amazon's blurb calls him "America’s most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East" which, okay, but the bar's pretty low. The Shah occupies a lull in US-Iranian relations between Operation Ajax, where we rat-fucked the British out of Iran and installed our own puppet government, and the October Revolution, where the Iranians rat-fucked the United States out of the Middle East. By the time Robert Ames was kidnapped the US was deep in a game of catch-up that they could never win, because we were so in bed with the Shah and SAVAK that we never bothered to do any independent assessment of the conditions on the ground. As a result, 25 years of intelligence groundwork got totally flushed out as a government that had been born and bred on hatred of the US rose organically to power. The mile-high view on the period described here is that Iran was shakey back in the '40s, with the monarchy propped up by the British, Mossadegh leading a populist Leftist campaign and Khomeini leading a populist Rightist campaign. Mossadegh swept out the monarchy and Khomeini griped; The CIA swept out Mossadegh and Khomeini griped. Khomeini being the only credible threat to the monarchy, however, he was sent into exile where he stewed and got famous like a Shia Dalai Lama. Eventually the Shah became so utterly disconnected from life in Iran that Khomeini came back and booted the Shah. We were so completely clueless about it that the CIA never even saw the October Revolution coming. The US was rightly seen as an enabler and director of Imperial oppression and if we weren't buying shit-tons of oil (and selling shit-tons of weapons back - call it a "lend lease program"; see also: Saudi Arabia) Iran would have booted us as soon as the Shah fell. Robert Ames fucking around and holding meetings doesn't change that fact. I've read a few different histories of the period. This excerpt is more impenetrable than any of them.