Book Review: Our Man in Tehran

ROBERT WRIGHT, Ph.D., is a professor of history at Trent University, specializing in foreign policy. He is the author of the national bestseller Three Nights in Havana, which won the 2008 Canadian Authors’ Association’s Lela Common Award for Canadian History and is currently being made into a feature documentary. He resides in Toronto with his wife and children. He is the author of five books. He received Lela Common Prize of the Canadian History for his national bestseller, “Three Nights in Havana”. He published this book following Harper Collins’s suggestion for a book on the 30th anniversary on the Hostage Crisis in Iran and Ken Taylor’s memories of his work in Tehran as the Canadian ambassador of the time (1978-1980) and his role in this period. Our Man in Tehran: Ken Taylor, the CIA and the Iran Hostage Crisis published in 2010. In response to the news about the book release on the online version of the Globe and Mail daily, Taylor said: “I never expected the story to come out. It had been under wraps for 30 years, and my assumption was that it would be for another 30 years. I didn’t expect to be here to talk about it”. The book narrates two and half years of the activities of Taylor in Iran. He came to Iran in September 1977, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was at his most powerful times, however fortune becomes available for the Wahhabis to promote their own ideas. Principal similarities between Iranian intellectuals and Wahhabis can possibly provide the necessary basis for the expansion of Wahhabi Discourse and surface-oriented religious ideas in Iran even in districts without any background for Wahhabism.