While researching a book about the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 (when students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran), Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden interviewed a fundamentalist scholar named Reza Ghapour.
"He told me with a straight face and a strong voice that the CIA had been responsible not only for installing and preserving the Shah [in 1941] but also for engineering his overthrow [in 1979] and secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that followed the coup and fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined and toppled it, and for secretly orchestrating the seizure of the Den of Spies [the embassy] and keeping fifty-two Americans (three of them initially trapped at the Iranian Foreign Ministry) hostage for more than a year.
"'Aren't some of these things mutually contradictory?' I asked. 'For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional government it was secretly supporting?' The slender, bearded Ghapour smiled at me with sweet condescension. 'You must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic of these things,' he said."