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. Diplomatic career Born in Iran, Bayandor served as a senior diplomat of the Iranian government in New York City and Tehran in the 1960s and 1970s. During final years of the 1970s he served as Foreign-Affairs Adviser to prime ministers Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Jamshid Amouzegar and Jafar Sharif-Emami. In an interview with Norman Forer in 1977, Bayandor defended status of human rights in the Imperial State of Iran and expressed his indignation with Amnesty International, calling its activities attempts to "vilify" and "interfere in internal affairs" of Iran. He added that all political prisoners in Iran had either committed or conspired to conduct violent acts, and argued that "when you have 40% illiteracy, you can't have democracy like in the United States". After the Revolution in 1979, Bayandor briefly served as director of the regional bureau for the Americas in the foreign ministry before joining the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1980 where he led several offices in Asia, Europe and Africa over a twenty-year period. His last assignment before retirement in 2000 was the Regional Representative for Central Africa and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator based in Democratic Republic of Congo during the wartime in late 1990s. Works published As a UN delegate to France, Bayandor wrote an article in 1996 about the humanitarian crisis of war refugees. In 1999 he submitted an editorial opinion piece to the International Herald Tribune about war refugees in Africa. Shifting to historic Persian poetry, In 2006 he published an essay about Iran's iconic fourteenth century poet Hafez, under the title, "Hafez: A Face-Off with Virtue". He contested the perennial orthodox narratives which accord a gnostic sense to the language of love and worldly pleasures by the poet, and project a theosophical interpretation to his outlook. In 2010 Bayandor published his study on the fall of Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, a fall which is widely attributed to the CIA. Titled, Iran and The CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited, Palgrave-Macmillan, (), the book argued that the failure of the Anglo-American coup plot, codenamed TP-Ajax, that brought at its wake the flight of the