An Iranian woman holds up her country's flag at an anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli rally at Enqelab-e-Eslami square in Tehran in June.Vahid Salemi/The Associated Press

Scott Anderson is the author of King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.

For the past several years, I’ve maintained a discreet internet correspondence with a group of Iranian professionals for a book I was writing on the Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the shah in 1978-79. I had hoped to go to Iran in person to conduct my research, but when I was strongly warned against doing so – the current regime has the disappointing habit of imprisoning Westerners on trumped-up charges of spying – I figured cultivating an online community was the next best thing. Admittedly, most members of this community are opposed to Iran’s present theocratic government to some degree – for this reason, they requested anonymity to speak frankly – but there’s actually quite a wide range of voices among them; certainly their dissatisfaction with the current government doesn’t automatically translate into support for wholesale regime change, even less for a return of the deposed monarchy. In the wake of the recent bombing strikes on Iran by Israel and the United States, I was interested to hear my contacts’ views on the situation. I was rather taken aback by their responses.

While I had anticipated a certain rallying-around-the-flag effect among Iranians after the air strikes – as a general rule, people don’t appreciate having bombs dropped on them by foreign armies – I was surprised by the level of despondency among the more ardent dissidents. “These attacks have set our movement back years,” one told me. “I think before we were on the verge of dramatic change, but now all that is gone.” The reason, he explained, was that the regime could now tar all domestic opponents as lackeys of the Israelis and Americans, collaborators with those who had killed hundreds of their fellow citizens. In this way, it was posited, the sclerotic theocracy that has held sway over Iran for nearly 50 years has gained a new lease on life.

Demonstrators protest Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Tehran in October, 1978.Michel Lipchitz/The Associated Press

But as it turned out, this was just the starting point. Where matters grew curious was when several of my contacts spun out a theory which held that Iran’s regime not only welcomed the attacks but helped engineer them by deliberately spurning negotiations until American bombs had joined the Israeli ones. One went so far as to suggest a secret deal had been cut between Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister, and the Iranian government, with U.S. President Donald Trump acting as the middleman.

Obviously, this requires a bit of explanation.

Generalizations about entire nationalities are always a risky thing, but a generalization that Iranians love conspiracy theories? Not so much. Over the course of researching my book, I think I heard most every conspiracy-theory permutation of “what really happened” in the Iranian Revolution that human imagination could devise. I had otherwise normal and intelligent Iranians tell me matter-of-factly that Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the late 20th-century’s more virulent antisemites, was actually an Israeli agent of influence, or that the 1979-81 American hostage crisis was engineered by Chase Manhattan Bank so that it could seize the billions of Iranian petrodollars stored in its vaults. Even the shah of Iran intermittently embraced a conspiracy theory that had his American and British allies conspiring in his........

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