🔥 THE TRIANGLE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

A Blog Series on Iran, the United States & Israel

📖 EPISODE 1: Before the Fire — The Forbidden Alliance

From Cyrus the Great to the Shah’s Secret Handshakes

“Our relations are like a true love between people without their getting married. It’s preferable that way.”
— David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister, on Iran, 1961

🏛️ PROLOGUE: A 2,600-Year-Old Bond

Before there was an Israel. Before there was a United States. Before there was even a modern Iran — there was Persia, and there were the Jews.

The year is 539 BCE. The great King Cyrus the Great, founder of the mighty Achaemenid Empire, marches into Babylon and does something no conquering king had ever done before. He frees the Jewish people from captivity — an exile that had lasted decades — and personally commands the rebuilding of their sacred Temple in Jerusalem.

In the Book of Ezra, the decree reads:

“Thus saith Cyrus, King of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth hath Yahweh, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem. Whosoever there is among you of all His people — let him go there.”

This act was so extraordinary that Cyrus is the only non-Jew ever called “Messiah” (anointed one) in the entire Hebrew Bible. A Persian king. A liberator. An unlikely savior of the Jewish people.

For centuries that followed, Jews thrived under Persian protection. Jewish academies flourished. The Babylonian Talmud — one of the cornerstones of Jewish civilization — was compiled under the Sassanid Persian rulers. Persian kings granted Jewish communities internal autonomy. It was not merely tolerance; it was a partnership woven into the fabric of two civilizations.

In Jerusalem today, a street near the city center still bears his name: Rehov Koresh — Cyrus Street.

This ancient bond between Persia and the Jewish people is not folklore. It is the original DNA of a relationship that would span millennia, twist through betrayal and alliance, and eventually explode into one of the most dangerous geopolitical conflicts of the modern world.

Source

🇺🇸 ACT ONE: America Finds Persia

Fast forward to the late 19th century. While Europe played chess with the Middle East, American missionaries and merchants were quietly making their way into Iran — then still called Persia — long before any government cared to.

American Presbyterian missionaries had been operating in Iran since the 1830s, building schools, clinics, and printing presses. They were not here for oil. They were here for souls. But in doing so, they created the first threads of an American-Iranian cultural connection — one that would grow, evolve, and eventually become geopolitically explosive.

By the early 20th century, the United States had formal relations with Persia, and American advisors were being invited in. Most famously, Morgan Shuster arrived in 1911 to help reorganize Iran’s chaotic treasury — and was promptly kicked out by Russian and British pressure. Arthur Millspaugh followed in the 1920s and 1940s with the same mission and similar frustrations.

The pattern was already forming: Iran wanted American friendship as a counterweight to British and Russian imperialism. America was flattered, interested — but not yet committed.

Source

🌍 ACT TWO: 1947–1948 — A New Nation, A Complicated Reaction

Then came the most consequential moment of the 20th century in the Middle East: the birth of the State of Israel.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition British-controlled Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab world erupted in fury. Most Muslim-majority nations voted against the plan. Iran was among them — voting no, predicting the partition would lead to “generations of fighting.” The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, reportedly said the same in private.

But what happened next defied every expectation.

In May 1948, Israel declared independence. The Arab armies invaded. The United States was the first country to recognize Israel — within eleven minutes of the declaration, by President Truman, over the objections of his own Secretary of State.

And then — Iran recognized Israel too.

Not reluctantly. Not secretly. Iran became the second Muslim-majority country in the world to formally recognize the new Jewish state, after Turkey. Back in Tehran, the government sent its minister Reza Saffinia to present credentials to Israeli President Chaim Weizmann in Rehovot.

In the streets of Tehran, 30,000 people had just weeks earlier protested against Israel’s creation. The Shah recognized it anyway. It was the first of many moments in this story where what leaders did and what people felt pointed in completely opposite directions.

Why? Because for the Shah, Israel wasn’t a religious question. It was a strategic calculation. Source

💥 ACT THREE: 1953 — The Coup That Changed Everything

To understand why the Shah was so pro-Western, pro-Israeli, and so deeply dependent on Washington, you need to understand what happened in 1953 — arguably the most consequential year in the entire story of the Iran-USA-Israel triangle.

In 1951, Iran’s charismatic, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh did the unthinkable: he nationalized Iran’s oil industry, seizing it from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). He was wildly popular. Time Magazine named him Man of the Year in 1951.

Britain was furious. The United States was nervous. And so, in August 1953, in an operation codenamed Operation Ajax (by the CIA) and Operation Boot (by British MI6), the two Western powers orchestrated a coup that overthrew Mosaddegh and reinstated the Shah — who had briefly fled the country — as the sole ruler of Iran.

This single act planted a seed of rage in the Iranian national consciousness that would take 26 years to fully detonate. But in the short term, it did exactly what Washington and London wanted: it put a pro-Western, oil-sharing king back on the Peacock Throne.

And with the Shah firmly in power, the US-Iran-Israel triangle truly began to take shape. Source

🤝 ACT FOUR: The Secret Alliance — Allies Without a Marriage

The 1950s through the 1970s represent one of the most extraordinary — and most hidden — alliances in modern history.

Israel’s strategic problem was existential: surrounded by hostile Arab states, it needed oil, intelligence corridors, and allies who weren’t Arab. Iran’s problem was equally urgent: it needed arms, technology, and a hedge against pan-Arab nationalism — particularly from Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq’s Ba’athist rulers.

Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had a doctrine for exactly this situation. He called it the “Alliance of the Periphery”: forge bonds with the non-Arab nations on the edges of the Arab world — Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia. Nations that shared Israel’s fear of Arab dominance.

What followed was a clandestine partnership of remarkable depth:

🛢️ The Oil Pipeline — Iran supplied Israel with a critical portion of its oil needs. Iranian crude flowed through the secret Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, shared jointly by Israeli and Iranian companies, bypassing the Suez Canal to reach European markets. Iran bought a 50% stake in the pipeline.

🕵️ Mossad & SAVAK — Israel’s foreign intelligence service (Mossad) and Iran’s feared secret police (SAVAK) ran joint operations in Iraqi Kurdistan, arming Kurdish rebels to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — a common enemy of both countries.

✈️ El Al flies Tehran — Israel’s national carrier El Al operated direct flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran, a connection so routine that Israeli engineers, military advisors, and agricultural experts traveled openly — though their identities were carefully managed.

🪖 Military Training — Israeli officers trained Iranian pilots and paratroopers. Israeli companies helped design Iran’s surveillance architecture near the Caspian Sea. There were never fewer than 100 Israeli advisors and technicians in Iran at any given time.

And the diplomacy? Conducted entirely in whispers and shadows.

🌹 The Secret Love Letters of Statesmen

In 1961, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion paid a clandestine visit to Tehran. Meeting Iranian Prime Minister Ali Amini, he described their relationship in words that have since become legendary:

“Our relations are like a true love between people without their getting married. It’s preferable that way.”

In 1972, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir made a secret visit to Tehran to meet the Shah personally. The Shah was so impressed by the 74-year-old prime minister that he later marveled to his court minister, “That old woman has such stamina.” Meir joked afterward about “my affair with the Shah.”

The Shah, for his part, saw Israel as a model of nation-building, military efficiency, and Western integration. He also believed — crucially — that a close relationship with Israel meant access to the influential American Jewish community, and through them, to the halls of power in Washington and the US Congress. He was not wrong. Source

And then there was the American piece of the triangle.

🦅 ACT FIVE: The American Patron

For the United States, during the Cold War, Iran under the Shah was priceless. It was a non-Communist, oil-rich, strategically located nation sitting on the Soviet Union’s southern border. Keeping the Shah happy was a matter of global strategy.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger visited Tehran and made a decision that would define the region for decades: they gave the Shah unrestricted access to American military hardware — virtually any conventional weapon he wanted, no questions asked. Iran became the largest buyer of American arms in the world. Boeing, Grumman, Northrop, and Lockheed all built their futures on Iranian contracts.

The three-way arrangement was almost elegant in its logic:

America protected Iran and sold it weapons
Iran supplied Israel with oil and intelligence cooperation
Israel provided Iran with arms, technology, and — quietly — American goodwill

Each needed the others. Each kept the others’ secrets. And each, in their own way, believed it would last forever.

It wouldn’t.

⚠️ THE STORM GATHERING

Even as the Shah dined with Golda Meir and signed billion-dollar arms deals with Washington, something was changing in the streets of Iran. In the mosques, in the universities, in the factories — a different Iran was being born.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled first to Iraq and then to France, had been preaching revolution for years. He called the Shah a puppet of America — the “Great Satan.” He called Israel the “Little Satan” and a knife in the heart of Islam. He spoke directly to the rage over the 1953 coup, the American arms deals, the SAVAK torture chambers, the oil wealth that flowed to the elite while millions stayed poor.

His voice was being smuggled into Iran on cassette tapes, passed from hand to hand in bazaars and homes across the country. The Shah dismissed him. Washington was unconcerned.

They should have listened more carefully.

🎬 EPISODE PREVIEW: What Happens When Love Turns to War

The alliance seemed unshakeable. The Shah sat on the Peacock Throne. American weapons filled Iranian hangars. Israeli engineers worked in Tehran. Oil flowed. Money flowed. Secrets flowed.

And then, on February 1, 1979, a black-robed figure stepped off a Air France Boeing 747 at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, greeted by millions of screaming Iranians.

Ayatollah Khomeini had come home.

Within days, the Israeli Embassy in Tehran was shut down. Its building was handed over to the Palestine Liberation Organization. El Al cancelled its Tehran flights. SAVAK was abolished. The Shah fled into exile.

The love affair was over.

But what came next — the hostage crisis, the secret arms deals, the proxy wars, and the shadow conflict that would eventually lead to missiles being fired between Tehran and Tel Aviv — was stranger, darker, and more ironic than anything the world had seen before.

Episode 2 will take you inside the revolution, the 444-day hostage crisis, and one of history’s greatest ironies: the moment Israel secretly armed the very regime that had declared it an enemy.

📌 EPISODE 1 TIMELINE AT A GLANCE

Year	Event
539 BCE	Cyrus the Great frees Jews from Babylonian captivity; commands rebuilding of the Temple
1830s	American missionaries begin presence in Persia
1947	Iran votes against UN Partition Plan for Palestine
1948	Israel declares independence; USA recognizes in 11 minutes; Iran becomes 2nd Muslim country to recognize Israel
1951	PM Mosaddegh nationalizes Iranian oil; becomes Time Man of the Year
1953	CIA/MI6 coup overthrows Mosaddegh; Shah restored to power
1955–1970s	Secret Iran-Israel alliance: oil pipelines, Mossad-SAVAK cooperation, military training
1961	Ben-Gurion’s secret visit to Tehran; the “love without marriage” quote
1967	After Six-Day War, Iran supplies Israel significant oil; Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline expands
1972	Nixon gives Shah unrestricted US weapons access; Golda Meir’s secret Tehran visit
1977–79	Joint Iran-Israel Project Flower missile development; revolution brewing
Feb 1979	Khomeini returns; the alliance shatters overnight

🔖 SOURCES & FURTHER READING

💬 What did you think of Episode 1? Drop a comment below.
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This blog series is written for curious readers who want to understand one of the most consequential relationships in modern geopolitics — told as the epic human story it truly is.

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Iran, Isreal & America Story

Episode 1 🔥 THE TRIANGLE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD