The letter to the Shah
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The letter to the Shah is the episode John Kiriakou offers when asked how conservative his politics were before he had any. He was, he thinks, fourteen or fifteen, and he wrote to the deposed Shah of Iran because he objected to Washington's handling of him.

> "I wrote to tell him that I was disgusted by the way our government had treated him, that once we had made a decision, we should have stuck with the decision, and the decision had been to allow him to come to the United States for treatment of his cancer. And when the heat got a little more than the president could handle, the Shah was unceremoniously thrown out and ended up in Panama, and then, later, the Bahamas."

The reply is the part of the story he enjoys. "He actually wrote me a letter back saying, you're right, it's terrible the way I've been treated; here's an autographed picture." Put to him that the Shah probably did not receive many letters of that kind, he agrees: "No, I'm sure he didn't."

It was not the only one. He also wrote to Margaret Thatcher, and received a signed photograph from Ezer Weizman, at the time the defence minister of Israel. Asked whether anyone had steered him in that direction, he says not: "it was my own thing. It was my own interest." His retrospective judgement is unsentimental, "these are people that today I wouldn't dream of writing a letter of support to, but back then I was pretty hawkish."

The interest behind it was foreign affairs rather than any of the individuals. He followed the Iran hostage crisis "day by day by day," staying up for Ted Koppel every night despite the hour, "because originally Nightline was to give us a daily update of events in Iran." It produced the conversation in which he told his father he did not want to be a dentist: "I think I want to join the foreign service." He was fourteen. His father's answer was "whatever you want to do, just do it well."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Reza Pahlavi
- George Washington University
