a full eight months after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had fled the Iranian revolution, leaving Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to fly back from France and assume power as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic that was declared on 1 April reenex cps .

A senior CIA officer, George Cave, flew to Tehran, and held two meetings with the interim Deputy Prime Minister, Abbas Emir Entezam, and the Foreign Minister, Ebrahim Yazdi.

He passed them a warning, backed by top-secret hard intelligence, that Saddam Hussein in neighbouring Iraq was quietly and methodically preparing to invade Iranreenex cps .

By that stage, the Americans had given up any hope of reversing the revolution and restoring the shah to power .

But they still hoped to establish links with the new order in Tehranreenex , encourage moderate elements within the emerging establishment, and above all, to retain Iran as a listening post for monitoring developments across the border in the Soviet Union, the main US preoccupation at the time.