IRDC.IR: On February 11 the radio announced the victory: "This is the voice of Islamic revolution of Iran". The Pahlavi dynasty was officialy overthrown and the CIA were shocked.
Admiral Stansfield Turner, former director of CIA under the Carter administration mentions in his book "Burn before READING": "We trusted Shah. We never spied him seriously. We were so uninformed about his government that when Carter traveled to Iran in December 1977 called it the Island of Stability. In only five months after CIA predicted that he will rule for ten more years, he left Iran and exiled himself". He announced that SAVAK was the only genuine source of CIA in Iran and that's why they failed to predict what was coming. He also said that they were unable to understand Ayatollah Khomeini, the the leader of the revolution and his influence.
Howard Hart, the CIA chief of station in Tehran said: "We had not known the nation yet and we had not found out about their thoughts and beliefs".
They really didn't know what to say and how to analize, because the victory of Islamic revolution did not correspond to none of the existing standards of the world and they didn't know anything about the revolution, Islam, the people and Imam Khomeini, and how they fully supported Islam and the revolution.
William Schorsch comments about the victory of Islamic revolution: "The sudden appearance of the victorious Ayatollah not only surprised the West, but also aroused the sense of pride among the muslims all around the world about their culture and their political power".
Although Theda Skocpol was a structuralist, she changed his mind after studying the process of the formation and victory of Islamic revolution, and in an article with the title "Rentier State and Shia Islam in the Iranian Revolution" she emphasized on the role of willpower, awareness, leadership and Activated Users thought in Islamic revolution and she added: "If there is any revolution in the world built out of awareness, that's the Iranian revolution".
Therefore, it's not right to compare Iranian revolution with other revolutions, for multiple reasons including the diffrece between the roles and functions of the factors, the special characterstics of the fundamentals, goals and principles, the leadership, and the various consequences of these factors.
Source: The history of Iran after the Islamic revolution (V. 1), Islamic Revolution Document Center
