Watching Iran in flames, I can’t help wondering whether history is coming a grotesque full circle 47 years after the fall of the US-backed Pahlavi dynasty, or whether western powers are simply repeating past errors by attempting violent regime change from outside.

As a young reporter, I had a ringside seat for part of the 1979 revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and installed an austere Islamic republic headed by a Shia Muslim cleric with the titles of “leader of the revolution” and “guardian jurist” (vali-e faqih).

Barely two years out of university, with a history degree specialised in the French Revolution, I was catapulted into covering a live revolution as epochal – and bloody – as the French and Russian convulsions. As a trainee correspondent for Reuters in Paris, I befriended exiled Iranian revolutionaries hanging out in the Latin Quarter in the months before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was expelled from Iraq in 1978 and granted temporary asylum in France.

Through those contacts, I was the first foreign journalist to interview Khomeini, a few days after he arrived in France and was installed in a modest suburban bungalow in Neauphle-le-Château, near Versailles. It took some haggling to see the “imam”. Aides tried to fob me off with written answers to my questions. Eventually, I was granted a 10-minute audience that I managed to stretch to 20. Abolhassan Banisadr, a Paris-based academic who went on to be elected Iran’s first president before being ousted and escaping back into exile in 1981, acted as an interpreter.

As I sat cross-legged on the floor opposite him, Khomeini barely acknowledged my presence, staring at the wall behind me as he spoke in a husky monotone. There would be no compromise with the shah, he said. Iran would become an Islamic republic. The US could do nothing to stop that. Bearing in mind Reuters’ business clients, I asked how foreign oil companies would be treated if the revolution triumphed. His answer was translated as: “We will cut off the hand of the foreigner.” I felt my own hand instinctively withdraw up my sleeve.

After we left the room,........

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