In February 1963, the government in Iran formed the Ministry of Economy—a pilot bureaucratic agency that was to oversee industrial transformation and generate growth. In 1969, after six years of unprecedented growth and significant industrialization,1 the political leadership withdrew its support for the ministry and broke down its autonomy. The fate of the ministry had little to do with its performance or promise in the economic arena. It was, rather, the political implications of the rise of an autonomous and competent bureaucratic agency, and the rationalization of industrial policy-making, that led the political leadership—and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in particular—to end its support for this experiment.