Darioush Bayandor

Who is Darioush Bayandor?

Darioush Bayandor is a former Iranian diplomat and official who worked for the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Following the Iranian Revolution, he left Iran to work for the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s before retiring to Switzerland where he writes and consults.

Born in Iran, Bayandor served as a senior diplomat of the Iranian government in New York City and Tehran in the 1970s. He was the director of the regional bureau for the Americas in the Iran foreign ministry and served as foreign-affairs adviser to two prime ministers of Imperial State of Iran. From 1975 he served on Iran's permanent mission to the United Nations. In 1980, Bayandor joined the UN and led several regional offices in Asia, Europe and Africa. In the 1990s he was the regional coordinator for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in refugee-heavy areas such as Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he served in the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In 2006, Bayandor wrote "Hafez: A Face-Off With Virtue" about the famous 14th century Iranian lyric poet, Hafez. His book Iran and The CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited, was published in 2010. The book has received mixed reviews, with the Economist and Washington Times describing it as "revisionist". Homa Katouzian, a historian and political scientist, dismissed the book as "political". Washington Times criticized the book stating that "a careful reading of Mr. Bayandor's book, along with the CIA history and Mr. Roosevelt's memoir, shows that there is a very thin element of truth in his revisionist theory". However, The Economist and World Affairs were more complimentary, the former noting that "Bayandor's scepticism is a useful antidote to Roosevelt's self-aggrandising, which some later writers have mimicked uncritically".