Irdc.ir: On 5 February 1979, CIA chief executive confessed that they failed to predict Iran's circumstance. We didn't expect a 78 year-old who was not in the country for 14 years to tie the forces so easily.
After the victory of Islamic Revolution, US politicians had conflicts about the weakness of CIA authorities to predict and evaluate Iran's upheavals، while more than 40.000 experts, advisors and intelligence officers were operating in Iran, especially in the border lines. Shah's regime was US gendarme in the middle east. The main critics of CIA actions were the senators and White House authorities. But CIA officers only repeated the comments of Stansfield Turner, then CIA director, that their only intelligence source inside Iran was SAVAK. And the failure was the result of trusting SAVAK reports. And this was a reason for CIA deficiency in overseas operations.
In December 1978, before Shah escaped Iran, when US political sources were sure about the fall of Shah, Washington Post published a report from CIA and explained the conflicts between Senators and CIA authorities. Financial Times from London published an outline from the report. "Khandaniha" Magazine published the report on 30 December 1978:
"After it was revealed that the CIA and SAVAK close relations could not give a right perspective from people's beliefs and feeling to US president in time, and CIA information were based on untrue reports of SAVAK, not only the president, but also the senators were dissatisfied and started negotiating with high ranked CIA officers. The officers claim that because Iran is a close friend of the United States, and we have a Defence Pact with them, we had to get all of our needed information from Iran's government. The source of the information was SAVAK and we had to deal with them. Iran is not our enemy so we didn't use unofficial sources such as people and groups. If we did so, it would led to Iran's dissatisfaction. SAVAK was always telling us that no danger threatens Iran's regime and did not care about the protests and oppositions of Iran's religious scholars. CIA authorities claimed that in recent years they've always had 50-75 permanent agents in Iran, plus our temporary agents in particular occasions. In 1963, there were a similar situation in Vietnam, where our officers contacted the adversaries of Ngo Dinh Diem، the Vietnamese dictator, Kennedy showed that he didn't trust his government and we witnessed the fall of his dictatorship. We didn't know what would happen if we contacted Shah's adversaries. The negotiations didn't convince the senators and they asked the Secretary of State to form a committee to investigate the issue.
United States, had asked CIA and other experts to install news obtainment machines during years. They are so expensive and contain important intelligence systems. But during the revolution none of them could help CIA.
