On returning to Iran, he joined the Persian Cossack Brigade, in which he served throughout is career, finally reaching the rank of Brigadier General.

From high school onwards and throughout this period he played football, becoming the first goalkeeper of Iran's national team “Tadj”, for ten years and so acquired great popularity.

[4] Fathollah Minbashian was 20 years old when he entered the Military Academy (Daneshgadeh Afsari) in the same class as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran's Crown Prince.

In 1944 he became a lieutenant, and he then passed the exam for the US Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, and having been promoted captain, he went to the United States with his wife.

He returned to the United States in 1951, as the Americans had qualified him to go to their war school, the Command and General Staff College of the US Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

In 1970, while on an official visit to the United States as Commander of the Imperial Iranian Ground Forces, General Minbashian received the US Legion of Merit.

According to several officers' testimonies reported in the Nima monthly journal in August 2007 (including the Shah's former Chief of Staff General Fereydoun Djam), two objectives guided his military thinking throughout his life: the defence of the Persian Gulf because he rightly feared invasion of Iran by Iraq, and the provision of a decent life for the army's soldiers and NCOs, usually from very modest backgrounds.

According to French Wikipedia,[7][circular reference] these protests were critical of the Shah's reformist White Revolution which in particular ended feudal landownership in Iran as part of a land reform programme, and gave women the right to vote.

In Section 38 of his military memoires, he recounts the context of this arrest and the strategy put in place so that the rebels laid down their arms and surrendered of their own will.

In April 1969, while he was Commander of the Imperial Ground Forces, Minbashian was assigned to deal with border tensions with Iraq, which, had they degenerated could have set the entire region ablaze, as history subsequently showed.

Iraq claimed sovereignty over the river (called Shatt al-Arab in Arabic) and threatened to block the passage of ships not flying the Iraqi flag.

The first was based on an analysis given by Alidad Mafinezam and Aria Mehrabi in Iran and Its Place Among Nations, in which the authors explain that one of the weaknesses of the Shah was his personal insecurity and inability to delegate responsibilities, especially military, to the high dignitaries of his army.

[13] The second factor leading to Fathollah Minbashian's dismissal was his constant concern and insistence with the Shah about creating a decent life for the soldiers and the non-commissioned officers of the army, from poor backgrounds.

Minbashian allegedly stated that what he was asking for was a mere drop in the ocean of the luxurious spending by Princess Ashraf (the Shah's influential twin sister).

[14][15][16] The third, most important factor was Minbashian's opposition to the fatalism concerning “tie-in contracts” imposed by Western arms’ sellers.

[17] Later, Minbashian stated on numerous occasions that he had been sacked by the Shah for his professionalism, his straight talking, and because of British pressure as he threatened their arms transactions and economic interests in Iran.

Like his two brothers Nemat and Ezatollah (who changed his name to Mehrdad Pahlbod when he married one of the Shah's sisters) Fathollah Minbashian was fond of music.

The Islamic Republic of Iran replied to his offer by publishing in the newspaper Mizan (dated 13 November 1980) a “summons by the Revolutionary Court to report to Evin Prison to answer the charge of having worked for the loss of the country’s wealth in favour of foreign powers”.

Ironically, the Islamic Tribunal thus invoked exactly the opposite reason for which he was fired by the Shah, namely that he had resisted foreign interests operating in Iran.