I am listening to James Clavell’s well-known novel about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Whirlwind. You might think I did this purposefully because of our current situation in Iran, but that’s simply not the case. I was watching some old movie and the protagonist, a troubled young man, was reading Clavell’s King Rat, the story of a Japanese POW camp in Thailand in 1945, and I remembered how much I liked Clavell’s Asian series (Shogun, Tai-Pan and Noble House) and thought I needed to fill in my Clavell suite with King Rat, the first novel he ever wrote. You see, Clavell was actually interred in the Changi POW camp for three years and he wrote King Rat from tragic personal experience. It’s the story of survival at any and all costs. Clavell shows us Changi as a complete society in miniature with its own economy, black markets, social strata, politics, moral codes, and constantly shifting power dynamics. The camp is both a prison and a pressure cooker that strips men down to their essential natures. While listening to antagonist Peter Marlowe’s observations about the basest nature of man it was hard not to think about one of my favorite movies, Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun when Christian Bale tells someone that the thing he learned from his POW internment is that “A man will do anything for a Hershey bar.” I then flashed to a memory of my first trip to the Middle East in 1987. I was running the Global Emerging Markets Department, a unit of my own creation, and was joined by my young colleague who I had assigned to run the region. He was a bit jumpy about being in Kuwait with the next stop in Saudi Arabia because he was reading James Clavell’s last novel, Whirlwind.
The novel is set in a specific and intensely political moment: Iran during its 1979 Islamic Revolution, the weeks immediately surrounding the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. The spine of the novel is the planning and execution of a daring illegal extraction: flying an entire helicopter fleet out of Iranian airspace without government permission, to save both the aircraft and the pilots’ lives. This operation, codenamed Whirlwind, is the climax toward which the entire book builds. It is logistically complex (multiple aircraft departing simultaneously from different Iranian bases to avoid interception), morally ambiguous (it is theft from a sovereign state by any legal definition), and deeply personal for every pilot involved. The major themes are about revolution as tragedy. Clavell does not present it simply as fanaticism triumphing over modernity. He shows the Shah’s regime as genuinely corrupt and brutal, the revolution as authentically popular, and the tragedy as the devouring of secular, educated, cosmopolitan Iranians, people who wanted reform but not theocracy, by the forces they helped unleash. Loyalty, duty, and moral compromise infect everyone. The Whirlwind operation forces every character to choose between personal survival and obligation, legality and practicality, love and self-preservation. Oil, power, and geopolitics is at the center of this all. The helicopters exist to service the oil industry, and the oil industry is why every great power… Britain, America, the Soviet Union, and even China… is maneuvering in Iran. The novel remains one of the more serious attempts in popular fiction to understand the Iranian Revolution from the inside out, and how could that not be important to better understand as Trump continues to pretend that he is resolving the issues we have, many of which he himself manufactured.
Do you remember the Biblical expression, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”? The meaning is that small or reckless actions (sowing the wind… something seemingly insubstantial) can produce catastrophically larger consequences (reaping the whirlwind). It’s a statement about the amplification of cause and effect, particularly for wrongdoing or foolishness. It has been given a military context like with the strategic bombing of Germany in WWII, when it was said that the Germans “sowed the wind” with their bombing of civilian populations and were now reaping the whirlwind, a statement that itself became controversial given the civilian casualties of the Allied bombing campaign. There’s the political rhetoric as well. It’s a standard piece of political oratory when describing blowback like from foreign policy decisions, economic policies, or social changes that return to devastate their authors. This all gets us to the reference in literature. Clavell’s title choice was almost certainly deliberate since the Iranian Revolution seems to fit this precisely with western powers manipulating and propping up the Shah for decades, and the whirlwind they reaped was Khomeini.
One of the recurring operational themes in the book is about the use of bribery by those who have been most unscrupulous to get themselves out of the whirlwind they have created. Persia/Iran has one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated traditions of what we might call transactional governance. They have a sophisticated system of ritualized politeness and deference, offering what you don’t intend to give, refusing what you actually want, deferring to the other party’s stated wishes while both parties understand the performance. This matters for understanding bribery there because it means that direct transactional language is almost never used. A payment that in another culture might be bluntly negotiated is, in Iran, wrapped in layers of courtesy, indirection, and face-saving performance. The bribe is never called a bribe; it is a gift, a courtesy, an expression of respect. What is striking about Iranian attitudes toward corruption is the sophistication of public ambivalence about it. Iranians are among the world’s most self-aware populations about the corruption of their own institutions. It is a constant subject of humor, complaint, and literary treatment. At the same time, participation in the system is near-universal because the alternative, refusing to navigate through informal payments, is simply to be ground down by a system that offers no other path. This produces a characteristic Iranian combination of cynicism about institutions, pragmatic participation in corruption, and genuine moral discomfort about both. There’s a word for this…kleptocracy.
Kleptocracy, governance structured around the systematic looting of public resources for private enrichment, is as old as organized states themselves. The term kleptocracy was coined in the 19th century but gained its modern political meaning in the mid-20th century, first applied seriously to post-colonial African states where it was used to describe governance organized primarily around private accumulation by rulers and officials. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 produced history’s most rapid and concentrated private accumulation of state assets. Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power didn’t end kleptocracy, it centralized and disciplined it. The state became the vehicle for enriching a new circle of loyalists while those oligarchs who challenged the Kremlin’s political primacy were expropriated or exiled. Putin himself is estimated by some analysts to control assets worth $200 billion or more, held through proxies and shell structures. My personal guess is that he’s worth more than Elon Musk. Across all eras and geographies, kleptocracy exhibits consistent features. It captures resources (Venezuela, crypto, Greenland, Cuba, public lands, etc.). It weakens accountability institutions (courts, legislatures, and the free press). There are loyalty purchases (kleptocrats must share the proceeds with enough supporters to maintain power…like a $1.8 billion fund for insurrectionists). It’s all about legitimizing their ideology (successful kleptocracies wrap extraction in a narrative that makes external criticism look like imperialism and internal criticism look like treason). And ultimately, not being unaware of how their actions will look in the rear-view mirror, they need exit strategies (off-shore bank accounts, immunity and preemptive pardons and indemnifications).
The history of kleptocracy is, in a sense, the shadow history of what happens when the apparatus of governance is captured by the very people entrusted to operate it. Imagine the world falling deeper and deeper into kleptoanarchy and the biggest players on the world stage trying to out-klepto one another in one of the original cultural centers of the practice. Is it any wonder that Iran sees Trump as an amateur at the art of this deal?