A country’s king can never be at peace,
The fears and trials he faces never cease.
—THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS
I want my son to inherit not dreams but
the realization of a dream.
—THE SHAH
His day began at seven o’clock with a soft knock on the bedroom door at Niavaran, the palace compound where he lived and worked in northern Tehran. “Good morning, Your Majesty,” said Amir Pourshaja, and by the time he returned from the bathroom the valet had set out a tray with toast, a little butter and honey, five or six pieces of prune, and a glass of orange juice. On occasion, the cook might liven the plate with two or three pieces of grapefruit, but in general he preferred plain, modest fare—he had a sensitive stomach and was allergic to onions, strawberries, and Iran’s famous caviar. A military aide brought in official correspondence and the morning papers, both foreign and domestic, to be read while he ate and his wife slept on. He received his first intelligence briefing of the day before he started reading.
The Kingdom of Iran, which Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had ruled over as Shahanshah or King of Kings for the past thirty-six years, occupied a vast southwest Asian desert plateau larger in size than Great Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany combined. An hour earlier, Amir had telephoned officials in each of Iran’s twenty-two provinces to collect their individual weather reports. What they told him was important because it usually determined the mood of the Shah—and thus the mood of his thirty-five million subjects—for the remainder of the day. News of rain brought cheer and satisfaction. No rain meant a furrowed brow and gloom. “His Majesty always worried about the weather,” said Amir. “He worried all the time. Because he knew weather affected the crops, and crops affected the people.” One morning, Amir told the Shah that it had rained during the night: “He was very happy.” So happy indeed that he walked over to the window in search of a tree branch moist with precipitation. When he couldn’t find one he turned to Amir with disappointment writ on his face: “It’s not wet! You told me it rained!” He knew exactly how many millimeters had fallen in each city in each province. He knew the amount of water in each of the dams. He knew because he had built them all, twenty-one to date, and often during the rainy season or after a big snowfall he liked to fly across the country in his executive jet to check the water levels from the air. One day at the Caspian, where he spent a part of each summer, the Shah peered off into the distance, staring up at the cloudless blue sky as if willing something to happen. One perplexed visitor, seeing his head craned for so long in the same position, worried that His Majesty had developed arthritis. “What is he doing?” he implored the household physician. “Looking for rain,” sighed his companion.
* * *
BEFORE THE CAMERAS and the crowds, His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Emperor of Iran, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God, and Custodian of the Shia Faith, exuded the storybook glamour of the bejeweled Peacock Throne and the majesty of twenty-five centuries of Persian monarchy. By December 1977 he had reigned as King-Emperor for so many years that most Iranians could remember no other ruler and most citizens of other nations knew no other Iranian. In the realm of international politics he had outlived or outlasted contemporaries, allies, and adversaries, including Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Kennedy, Nixon, Mao, Franco, and de Gaulle. Three brilliant marriages to three equally remarkable women had sired five children and made Iran’s Imperial Family a staple of the picture magazines and gossip columns. The Shah’s bemedaled uniforms, aquiline features, and silver hair had graced television news programs and the front pages of newspapers for so long that one visitor to Niavaran, upon meeting him, experienced “a feeling of déjà vu, as you do with some landscapes—as I did when I saw Machu Picchu or the Great Wall for the first time.”
The life story of the Shah of Iran was worthy of the Persian Book of Kings, the literary epic by Ferdowsi that traced the rise and fall of Iran’s royal dynasties through the centuries. After succeeding to the Peacock Throne in 1941, when he was barely out of his teens, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi survived mortal threats that would have broken lesser men: the wartime invasion and occupation of his country, Communist subversion, a plane crash, assassination attempts, coup plots, dynastic intrigue, religious revolts, constitutional crises, and even a brief spell in exile. In an era when other kings and queens were forced from their thrones or reduced to a life spent cutting ribbons and shaking hands, the Shah bucked the tide of royalty in the twentieth century when he decided to rule as well as reign. Not content to merely gather power, in 1963 he embarked on his White Revolution, an ambitious program of social and economic reforms to transform Iran from a semifeudal baron state into a modern industrial powerhouse. Peasant farmers were freed from bondage to landowners. Forests and waterways were nationalized. Women were granted their civil, legal, and political rights. By the time the Shah staged his belated coronation four years later, Iran’s rate of economic growth outstripped those of the United States, Great Britain, and France. Critics who had once dismissed Iran’s King as a callow playboy now applauded his achievements and acumen. “We are delighted to salute the Shah of Iran on the day of his Coronation,” declared Britain’s Daily Mail. “During his 26-year reign he has never once involved his country in war. He has shown the way to beat hunger, want, squalor and disease by methods from which other countries could learn.”
The Shah didn’t stop there. In the early seventies he exploited Cold War tensions to achieve regional hegemony over the Persian Gulf, then pulled off the coup of the century by engineering the December 1973 “oil shock.” The overnight doubling of the price of oil achieved the single greatest transfer of wealth between sovereign states in recorded history. Flush with his new billions, the leader of the world’s second largest oil exporter lavished resources on industry, education, health, welfare, the arts, and the armed forces. At the heart of his program of reform was an ironclad commitment to education. Between 1967 and 1977 the number of universities increased in number from 7 to 22, the number of institutions of advanced learning rose from 47 to 200, and the number of students in higher education soared from 36,742 to 100,000. Iran’s literacy programs were among the most innovative and effective anywhere in the world, so that by 1977 the number of Iranians able to read and write had climbed from just 17 percent to more than 50 percent. The Shah embarked on a military buildup, placed orders for nuclear power stations, and announced that the days when foreign powers could get their way in Iran and the region were over. “Nobody can dictate to us,” he boasted. “Nobody can wave a finger at us because we will wave back.” In 1974 Time magazine anointed him “Emperor of Oil” when it declared that the Shah “had brought his country to a threshold of grandeur that is at least analogous to what Cyrus the Great achieved for ancient Persia.” American, European, and Japanese corporations rushed to set up headquarters in Iran and enter into joint business ventures. “Boom?” asked an American investment banker. “We haven’t seen anything yet. They are now dependent on Western technology, but what happens when they produce and export steel and copper, when they reduce their agricultural problems? They’ll eat everybody else in the Middle East alive.”
The numbers behind Iran’s rise were impressive and few doubted that the Iranian people, reported the Chicago Tribune, were “living better than most of their country’s neighbors.” Since 1941 national income had multiplied 423-fold and since 1963 the country’s gross national product had risen 14-fold. Yet Iranian society had paid a price for prosperity. Political institutions and the judiciary were subordinate to the wishes of the Shah, his ministers, and the security forces. “The Shah’s power is virtually total,” reported one observer. “Only one political party is permitted, and debate is carefully contained.” Newspapers, radio, and television were “embarrassingly obsequious” in their coverage of the regime and subject to censorship. The state security police was “one of the most pervasive such organizations in the world” and accused by its critics of imprisoning, torturing, and killing thousands of dissidents. Tens of thousands more Iranians preferred to live outside the country than endure repression at home. The Shah’s economic reforms were also scrutinized. Much of Iran’s new wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small ruling elite: 10 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth. Most of Iran’s sixty-one thousand villages still lacked “piped water, sanitation, doctors, electricity.” One physician claimed that families living in rural Karaj subsisted on four and five grams of protein a week. “People hunt for undigested oats in the droppings of horses,” he said. Iranian intellectuals sneered at the Shah’s efforts to modernize a poor, semiliterate country. “It’s all skin deep” was the common refrain among university students who dismissed the White Revolution as a giant fraud. “It’s all fake pretension.” The Shah received no credit for his achievements, though even his opponents acknowledged that conditions weren’t nearly as bad as they could be: “Given the mentality of the Iranian people, it would be ten times worse here under any other regime.”
Despite these controversies, in the last few weeks of 1977 Imperial Iran cut its way through the international scene with the stately grandeur of a Cunard liner on its maiden voyage. While Americans and Europeans grappled with high unemployment, inflation, political scandals, and labor unrest, most Iranians were preoccupied with more mundane affairs. The Shah celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday and was cheered by news of a welcome boost to oil production. He hosted state visits from the presidents of Egypt and Somalia and attended the Aryamehr Cup tennis finals at the Imperial Country Club. He was pleased to hear that America’s prestigious Georgetown University now ranked Iran as the world’s fifth-strongest nation. His government completed trade deals with France and West Germany to build nuclear power plants, New Zealand to supply lamb, the Soviet Union to increase steel production, and the United States to supply five million telephones. In December 1977 the volume of trades on the Tehran Stock Exchange surpassed 5.9 billion rials for the first time and officials reported a record 380,000 tourists to Iran in the past year. Iran’s reputation as a haven to do business was burnished by the presence of more than 100,000 foreign residents inspired by the Shah’s vision of transforming his country into the Japan of West Asia, and lured by the prospect of comfortable lives with servants, swimming pools, and tennis courts. The 52,000 Americans living in Iran in 1977 made up the largest concentration of U.S. nationals living abroad. Other expatriate communities in Iran included 8,000 Britons, 8,000 French, 16,000 West Germans, 20,000 Italians, and tens of thousands more Filipinos and Koreans employed as guest workers. “Look at them,” crowed an Iranian businessman. “The flies have come to gather at the honeypot.”
Foreigners living in Iran considered the country a sure and safe bet for the future. The kingdom was defended by a crack professional fighting force whose 413,000 men and women began each day reciting their pledge to defend “God, Shah, and Fatherland.” The Shah’s pride and joy were the three branches of the Imperial Armed Forces. The quarter-million-strong army was divided into armored and infantry divisions. Four separate brigades, including special forces and airborne units, “can maintain internal security and halt an invasion by any neighboring state except the Soviet Union.” Pride of place in the army went to the Immortals, the twenty-thousand-strong Imperial Guard equipped to fight as infantry and assist regular ground forces at home or overseas. Iran’s air force was “capable of defeating any regional air force except that of Israel, and possibly Turkey.” The air force dominated the skies over southwestern Asia and boasted the ability to fly hundreds of extra miles outside Iranian airspace. Iran’s navy ruled the waves in the Persian Gulf, patrolled deep into the Indian Ocean, and prowled the coast of East Africa. The regular army was complemented by two paramilitary forces. Seventy-five thousand gendarmerie guarded the borders and secured the countryside, trained to provide early warning of foreign aggression or internal subversion, and their 45 regiments and 2,240 gendarmerie posts were equipped with light machine guns, mortars, helicopters, and patrol boats. The National Resistance Force numbered 80,000 personnel and was organized into local-level company- and battalion-size units outfitted with small arms and rifles. The Iranian police was 40,000-strong.
In his fervent nationalism and authoritarian leadership the King of Iran echoed the rulers of centuries past but in particular his idol President Charles de Gaulle of France, the very model of the twentieth-century nationalist strongman. “His is a formidable personality, which he employs skillfully to advance Iran’s interests in such matters as increasing oil revenue and acquiring sophisticated military equipment from hesitant sellers,” noted an American intelligence assessment. “In short, the Shah has developed into a confident ruler, who knows what he wants and how to get it. He is sure that his way is best for Iran and that monarchical power, wisely used, is essential to the country’s well-being. He is, all in all, a popular and respected king. We might ask: Are there no flies in the ointment of Iranian success? Do not some wish him ill and work against him? Can he continue to go onward and upward forever?”
* * *
AFTER BREAKFAST, THE Shah returned to his bathroom to shave and brush his teeth. Dressing with the help of his valet, he selected a cravat and slipped a miniature copy of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, inside his front breast jacket pocket. Courtiers recalled the time he walked into his office, patted his jacket, and with a stricken look on his face exclaimed, “My Quran, I forgot it! I have to go back!” Ready for the day and already fully briefed on the domestic and international situation, at nine o’clock he exited his suite accompanied by Colonel Kiomars Djahinbini, his personal bodyguard and the head of palace security. The colonel walked a pace behind and for the remainder of the day never let the Shah out of his sight. Together they crossed a landing, headed down a flight of stairs past smartly saluting military guards, and strolled out onto the sunlit palace grounds. “I remember him coming down the stairs,” recalled Crown Prince Reza, who was seventeen years old in December 1977 and in his last year of high school before moving to Texas to train as a pilot at Fort Reese Air Force Base. “He would ask me to walk to his office with him. The first question of the day was always the weather report.”
His office was a short walk away from the Niavaran residence along a pathway shaded by plane trees, down a flight of stone steps, and through a small wooded grove that led to a second palace, the Jahan Nama, the low-slung residence of the former ruling Qajar Dynasty. Now refurbished as an office complex, the Jahan Nama boasted exquisite Persian carpets, intricate tile work, and luminous stained-glass windows. Greeted at the entrance by Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar, he climbed the stairwell to the second floor along a corridor that passed several anterooms, including one for gift wrapping and another for the palace dentist, before entering his office, a vast, cavernous space whose spectacular mirrored ceiling and inlaid walls resembled a jewel box radiating diamond light. Regardless of the temperature and season, he worked without air-conditioning. Sensitive to chills and drafts, he could not abide modern artificial air to the point where he drove with the windows down and forbade the installation of cooling devices in his various residences—he hated the expense as much as the air. But by late May, with the heat from the plains climbing up the hillsides, Niavaran became so oppressive that the entire household was forced to decamp farther up the slopes of the Alborz Mountains to Saadabad, a second royal compound of lush, forested acreage whose White Palace served as the Pahlavis’ summer residence. When temperatures cooled again in the autumn the family and their servants returned to Niavaran, and the White Palace was converted into a guesthouse for visiting foreign heads of state.
Palace officials were already at their desks when His Imperial Majesty walked in the room. The Shah was a stickler for punctuality who rarely ever ran late for appointments. The bulk of each day was spent behind his desk, though days at a time were spent away on regional inspection tours to open and inspect new factories, dams, schools, hospitals, power plants, and oil refineries, and also abroad, on state visits to capitals in every corner of the globe. After consulting with Afshar, who managed his daily program, the Shah met with Minister of the Imperial Court Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran’s former long-serving prime minister who four months earlier had assumed the post responsible for the overall running of the Imperial Court and household. “We start getting work from [the Shah’s] office at eight in the morning,” one aide explained. “We work through meals and until the middle of the night. We go to sleep exhausted, and then we get more work to do.” The Shah did not hesitate to bypass the chain of command. “Often I order minor officials to tell their superiors what I want done,” he explained. He delighted dropping in to make unannounced inspections. One year earlier, air force commanders at a base near the city of Isfahan learned they had just eight minutes to prepare for his arrival. “I barely had time to get there before he landed,” recalled the base’s deputy commander. “The plane was a Boeing 727, and he was flying it himself with just a copilot, an engineer, and one other man with him. We were in quite a state here, I can tell you.”
Though Iran had a prime minister, cabinet, and parliament, the Shah projected an image of absolute control and made it clear that in the realm of decision making all roads led to Niavaran. “I not only make the decisions, I do the thinking,” he famously boasted. He approved and often handled treaty negotiations and defense contracts, negotiated contractual terms and conditions with foreign oil companies, and even agreed to salary increases for oil workers and the timing of oil refinery overhauls. As the son of a general who had seized power in a coup, and in a part of the world where armed revolts were a common occurrence, he kept a close eye on his army, navy, and air force. No military plane took off or landed without his permission. No member of the armed forces was promoted above the rank of lieutenant colonel without his explicit approval. When foreign journalists visited Iran their itineraries were sent to the Shah for inspection. “Copies of every story written about Iran go to his desk, according to aides,” recalled a team of American journalists who visited Iran in December 1977. “Once, while visiting a hospital, he ordered a swimming pool dug for the doctors. Plans for building design require his approval. In factories he asks intricate questions on electronics, production rates, and manpower problems. He reads arms catalogues to relax.”
The Shah was impatient for results and hated to hear excuses. “He only wanted to get things done,” remembered one of his advisers. “He was always asking questions. Questions! Questions! Questions! And he would look at you with those eyes!” Exceptionally well-read and a quick study, the Shah enjoyed policy discussions with his ministers but drew the line at debate. “He would let you explain yourself,” said one former cabinet minister. “He was very open in private. I experienced it myself many times and on many issues. And in meetings he would let ministers talk. But he did not appreciate it if they tried to debate him.” He prided himself on his breadth of knowledge. “He asks very, very sharp questions,” said the manager of an electronics factory in Shiraz who received the Shah. “If you try to b.s. him, he’ll know it right away.” “He was familiar with everything that was going on in the world,” marveled Armin Meyer, President Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to Tehran in the late 1960s. “In military affairs he was smarter than most of our Pentagon people. Very intelligent, very impressive person, and one who had very strong feelings.” Ambassadors knew better than to cross him. “Once you lost his goodwill you were finished,” recalled Sir Denis Wright, who served as Britain’s envoy under Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Mornings were spent issuing directives, receiving dignitaries, signing legislation into law, and reading the intelligence reports that streamed in from the provinces. The much-feared secret police, Savak, maintained internal security and kept a close watch on events beyond Iran’s borders. Once a week the Shah received Savak chief General Nematollah Nasiri to review major intelligence findings, and one morning each week was set aside for separate interviews with the three commanders of the army, air force, and navy. If the foreign minister was traveling, he and the monarch exchanged notes in a case padlocked to the wrist of a close aide. The system was fail-safe—they were the only possessors of the two keys that could open the case—though one time it was fastened so securely in Vladivostok that by the time the go-between reached Tehran his wrist had started to blacken. With these systems in place the Shah felt confident that he enjoyed absolute control and would not be blindsided by events. He dismissed a courtier’s advice that he hold regular meetings with ordinary people from different walks of life. “But I already know what the people think,” he replied. “I’m fed report after report from goodness knows how many sources.” The advent of modern technology meant that he no longer worried about being seen in the flesh: “My voice is heard everywhere, my face is seen everywhere; heard through the radio, seen through the TV. The contact is there.” At his desk, while he worked his way through the stacks of paperwork with the help of the head of his Special Bureau, Nosratollah Moinian, he gave instructions on how to respond to individual requests. All this was done verbally and without the use of a stenographer or a Dictaphone.
The Niavaran compound with its two palaces sat perched on a high promontory nestled in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. Beyond the canopy of plane trees and down the slopes sprawled the capital, Tehran, “the foot of the throne,” though on most days its 4.5 million inhabitants were hidden behind a grimy shroud of yellow smog and grit. The Shah had grand plans for Tehran, which one visitor in the midseventies unkindly compared to “some enormous earth slide spilling slowly southward onto Iran’s great desert plateau.” Six years earlier, at the conclusion of the Persepolis celebrations, the Shah had inaugurated the soaring Shahyad Monument in downtown Tehran in the presence of the Emperor of Ethiopia and the Kings of Greece, Denmark, Norway, and Nepal. The Shahyad’s four giant latticed feet thrust skyward as a lyrical if pointed reminder that the spirit of ancient Ctesiphones, capital of Persia’s Sasanian Empire, was embodied in the vaulting ambitions of the modern Pahlavi state. Museums, concert halls, and art galleries as fine as any in New York and London already lined the grand central park named after his wife, Queen Farah. Construction on an underground metro had started, building was under way on a new international airport nineteen miles to the south, and approval had been granted for a twelve-mile-long, half-mile-wide forested green belt to improve air quality, preserve agricultural farmland, and protect Tehran from desert sandstorms. The Shah was anxious that his seventeen-year-old heir inherit a capital befitting one of the world’s five great powers.
He walked back to the family residence in time for his usual 1:30 p.m. lunch with the Queen, who often ran a few minutes late. The half-hour meal was usually their first meeting of the day. His favorite lunchtime dish was cutlet of roast chicken, which was eaten to the bone. Lunch was followed by the all-important two o’clock national radio news broadcast, which the monarch never missed but which his wife often skipped to attend to business. At the conclusion of the national news report, the Shah retired upstairs to undress and nap. Refreshed, he rose and changed suits, returned to the office, and started the day over again.
* * *
AFTERNOONS CONSISTED OF another round of paperwork, meetings, and official engagements, though the Shah almost always found time to exercise. An accomplished equestrian, competitive skier, and tennis player, he also enjoyed swimming, waterskiing, volleyball, and extreme sports such as jumping out of a helicopter into the ocean without wearing a life vest. Several afternoons during the week, usually at about three o’clock if his wife was out of town or on her own engagements, he might drive to a safe house near the palace for an hour or two trysting with a young paramour. These pastimes, outlets to alleviate the pressure of a lifetime spent in the public eye and almost four decades on the throne, merely hinted at the contradiction between his public image and his private personality and character.
Before his people the Shah projected a martial image, “stern, icily correct, almost devoid of humor. He seldom indulges in a smile, never a hearty laugh. He is friendless, suspicious, secretive, and, some say, paranoid.” “Some found him a little humorless most of the time,” agreed Cynthia Helms, whose husband, Richard, served as America’s ambassador to Iran. “The scar on his lip, caused by a 1949 attempt on his life, gave him a slightly cynical appearance. During the day he usually wore a double-breasted suit, and always stood ramrod straight. I could never decide whether this was because of his military training or to give him greater height.” The shoes he wore, slightly elevated to add another inch of height to his five foot eight frame, were the only outward sign of insecurity. The Shah’s starchy behavior proved too much even for that other model of royal rectitude, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, when the couple were paired up during celebrations to mark the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. After the party ended Elizabeth let the British Foreign Office know that she found the Shah “rather a bore” and “very heavy” because all he wanted to do was talk shop. She hosted him a decade later at Windsor Castle and found no improvement; once again she let it be known that she “found the Shah heavy going.”
So guarded in his facial expressions that courtiers studied his every gesture to discern the slightest shift in mood, if the Shah was pensive, contemplative, or anxious his fingers would drift up to his forehead to play with a loose strand of hair. If agitated or otherwise stimulated or excited, he would rise from his chair to start pacing back and forth around the office. “The expression in his face never changed,” remembered Khalil al-Khalil, Lebanon’s ambassador to the Pahlavi Court. “He loved to show that he was as solid as Iran. He always kept a distance from people.” “As serious as a mullah, he never said anything stupid, smoked hardly at all, and almost never drank alcohol,” recalled Soraya Esfandiary, the second of his three wives. She recalled that even in private he addressed her formally, using the Persian word for “you” normally reserved for acquaintances and strangers. Queen Farah also marveled at her husband’s discipline. “He had really great self-control,” she recalled. “One time a photographer’s flashbulb exploded during a photo shoot. Everybody jumped. He didn’t move. It was fantastic.” One of the few occasions when he lost his temper with her in front of company came during a drive down the Caspian coast from Ramsar to Nowshahr. Car journeys were fraught affairs because His Majesty was a speed demon who liked nothing better than to floor the accelerator while his wife pleaded with him to slow down before they were killed. “Not so fast! Not so fast!” Farah cried as the car gained speed. Then, just as her husband turned to calm her, a bird flew straight into the windshield, forcing him to suddenly brake and almost lose control of the car. “And then he turned around and shouted at me,” she said, laughing at the memory.
His remarkable capacity for self-control revealed itself in an incident at a missile test range in 1976. The Imperial Air Force had taken possession of a new batch of Maverick missiles, and the Shah trooped out to the desert with a group of high-ranking Iranian and American diplomats and generals to watch the first tests. “The missile was fired from six miles away,” recalled General Mohammad Hossein Mehrmand. “Then something went wrong. Instead of exploding, the missile executed a ninety-degree turn and flew straight toward the pavilion where the guests were standing. Everyone, including the American generals, threw themselves to the ground.” Everyone, that is, except the Shah, who stood ramrod straight, feet firmly planted on the floor, his face immobile, while the missile flew straight over his head and beyond to explode in a fiery ball whose shock waves almost collapsed the pavilion. While the stunned generals collected themselves off the ground, General Mehrmand ran to the Shah’s side. “Majesty! Majesty!” he cried. “We should stop!” The Shah was puzzled by the suggestion—why would anyone want to stop? “No, no,” he replied, “we will continue.” The shaken assembly took their seats and the test resumed. The second missile exploded on cue. The Shah took a bet with Mehrmand that the third missile would take just forty-five seconds to strike its target. When the Shah was proven right he momentarily forgot where he was: “He took his hat and threw it on the ground, he was so happy.”
On the test ground that day the Shah had shown fatalism and courage under fire but also the boyish side that almost never found public expression.
* * *
ONLY FAMILY MEMBERS, close friends, and courtiers were aware that behind the public bravado and gold braid the Shah was a man of surprising modesty and remarkable shyness. For outsiders who met him for the first time, the disconnect between the monarch’s public and private sides was jarring. “On a one-to-one, eyeball-to-eyeball basis, he is mild, even a little timid and shy,” said a Western ambassador. “He speaks so softly that you sometimes strain to hear him. He likes to hear jokes, but he is utterly humorless himself. Really he is not a colorful personality. But in public he is the forceful striding monarch, stern looking and purposeful, and always slim and fit looking from exercise and careful dieting. Frankly I think the shy quiet man probably is the real Shah. The other one is a personality that he has had to practice in front of a mirror most of his life to master.” “He was exactly the opposite of what people thought of him,” observed Mahnaz Afkhami, Iran’s first minister of women’s affairs. Before she entered government she had only ever seen the Shah from a distance. “I accompanied the Shah and Shahbanou to Pakistan. I had the chance to see how he interacted. He was a very mild guy.”
Shyness was reinforced by his father’s first lesson in leadership: never let the people see you as you are. “My father was shy,” confirmed Crown Prince Reza. “He put on a mask in public. Maybe he should have tried more to show his real face. He followed the example set by his father. Part of the reason he put on a mask was that a different face would have been perceived as weak.” As a young prince, the Shah had been taught to maintain a certain reserve even in his personal relationships and never to trust anyone completely. “If I take a liking to someone,” he once admitted, “I need only the smallest shred of doubt to make me break it off. Friendship involves the exchange of confidence between two people, but a king can take no one into his confidence.” On the times when Farah urged her husband to smile more in public, the Shah reminded her that displays of emotion conveyed weakness. On Fridays, when family and friends gathered at Niavaran to eat lunch, watch movies, and play cards, he was careful not to spend too much time in the company of one guest lest the others gain the impression that he held him or her in higher favor.
He dreaded small talk, struggled to make eye contact, and was visibly uncomfortable in informal social settings. These attributes and habits led many observers to conclude that the Shah was arrogant or worse. In November 1977 the Pahlavis visited Washington, DC, and were entertained at the White House by jazz legends Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie who performed an after-dinner concert in the East Room. At the end of the show President and Mrs. Carter left their seats and walked up on the dais to personally thank them. Queen Farah rose, too, but everyone noticed that the Shah remained “stiffly seated” in his chair—he had frozen at the prospect of standing up in front of the crowd. His wife, fearing an incident, whispered in her husband’s ear to join them onstage. Still he remained glued to his seat, to the point that Farah physically clutched his arm and guided him onto the stage. But the damage was done and the next day the false rumor spread that the Shah of Iran had remained seated because he did not want to shake hands with black musicians. Iran’s preeminent dress designer, Parvine Farmanfarmaian, recalled the time she broke her foot skiing in the Alps. The Shah was skiing nearby and when he learned of her misfortune expressed his sympathy. During her infrequent visits to the Imperial Court she sometimes found herself dancing with the Shah. “He was so shy,” she said. “While we danced, the only thing he could think of to say to me was ‘How is your foot?’ That was the only subject he talked about. This went on for two or three years—the same question every time—until finally I said, ‘Majesty, isn’t there something else we can talk about? I have told you, my foot healed a long time ago.’”
To shyness was added a capacity for denial and a tendency to avoid conflict, personal confrontations, and bad news. The last thing the Shah wanted to do was cause offense or hurt the feelings of those around him. “There was a gentleman, Mr. Nicknam, who looked after the sports facilities at Niavaran,” recalled the Queen, who often ran interference for her husband. “Every morning my husband walked from the residence across the lawn to his office, and every morning this gentleman would walk by his side grumbling about this or that thing. And His Majesty said to me, ‘This man is bothering me. I start my day feeling happy and he is always full of complaints.’ So I talked to the gentleman. I said, ‘Please don’t bother His Majesty with these problems. Come to me. You know I am responsible for looking after the household.’ My husband was very kind. He didn’t want to offend anyone.” The Shah’s sensitive, retiring nature was also the product of long periods of forced convalescence during childhood. The little prince had almost died of typhoid, was stricken with whooping cough and malaria, and throughout his life suffered from gastrointestinal discomfort. He had a sensitive liver, an enlarged spleen, and a compromised immune system that left him vulnerable to viral infections and frequent bouts of the flu. His preference for sunglasses to shield his eyes, which were sensitive to bright light, only reinforced the image of a remote, untouchable autocrat. For someone already naturally inclined to solitude and with the instincts of a loner, the constant pressure to make decisions and maintain a rigorous public schedule led to stress marked by bouts of debilitating depression, stomach trouble, and anxiety. Insomnia was such a problem that on his worst nights not even Valium could get him to sleep.
Within the Niavaran household the Shah was known as considerate and uncomplaining. When he traveled abroad he made sure thank-you gifts were distributed to attendants and hotel staff. During a state visit to the United States he paid the medical expenses of the mother of his Secret Service agent out of his own pocket. On the same trip he took the serving dish out of the hands of an elderly female server. “I can’t allow this,” he protested. “She is like my mother.” In the palace he never made a fuss. When his valet accidentally gave him the wrong medication for an ailment he insisted the matter be dropped to spare them both the embarrassment of a scene. Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar recalled the time they were traveling in Austria and the Shah made his motorcade turn around and go back to their hotel after remembering he had forgotten to say farewell to the porter. “I am sorry I was too busy and I was not able to say good-bye,” he said, shaking the astonished man’s hand. “Thank you for all the kindness and hard work.” Another time, he expressed disappointment with one of his advisers. “Pull this fellow’s ears,” he told Afshar, and then thought better of it: “Make sure you don’t pull too hard. I don’t want his ears to fall off!”
His dry, understated sense of humor reflected a fatalistic attitude toward life and its absurdities. An American reporter once asked what it was like to be Iran’s king. The Shah pointed to a bullet wound that creased his lip from an earlier assassination attempt and offered a dry one-word retort: “Dangerous.” Another time, he reminded a visitor that his people had been ruled by more than a hundred kings from a dozen different dynasties. “And do you know how many died peacefully in their beds?” he asked with a wry smile. Holding up four fingers, he said, “It’s not a good job.” Asadollah Alam, his closest adviser and one of the few men who could put him at ease, was a former prime minister who went on to serve as Hoveyda’s predecessor as minister of the Imperial Court. When the two men were alone they bantered back and forth like two college roommates, though Alam was careful never to overstep the mark. The two men were flying from Tabriz to Tehran when Alam recounted the time he lost his virginity to an older lady who had just downed a plate of garlic. On hearing this, the Shah fell “into such prolonged laughter that Her Majesty the Queen and the others became seriously alarmed.”
Though the Shah enjoyed the use of five palaces and was widely assumed to be one of the richest men in the world, he paid no attention to his bank accounts and showed no interest in money except as a means of spreading largesse. For someone who was thoroughly distrustful in affairs of state he was surprisingly, even shockingly, naive about personal matters. When the palace accountant presented him with checks to sign he never stopped to ask what he was paying for; he was unable to conceive that his own servant would ever cook the books. The women in his life despaired at his reluctance to spend money on himself. The suits he wore had long since gone out of style, and his casual clothes hadn’t been updated since the early fifties. His wife’s efforts to style his wardrobe met with varying degrees of success. Maryam Ansary, the vivacious wife of the minister of finance, tried a different tack. One night at dinner she mentioned in passing that she had found “a fantastic tailor” to make suits for her husband and the prime minister. “Oh, so now you’re in the fashion industry,” the Shah needled her. The lady took the bull by the horns, so to speak, and retorted, “Your Majesty, your suits look old!” and the two set off on a good-natured round of sparring about the merits of spending money on clothes. His indulgences were confined to the two or three new wristwatches he purchased each year, the nineteen sports cars he loved to tear about in, and a stable of magnificent Persian, Turkmen, and Arabian horses.
The Shah’s portrait hung in every public and many private dwellings in Iran. “You can’t throw a stone without hitting one,” went the joke. “And if you do, you’ll get arrested.” Iranians fed up with the cult of personality would have been surprised to learn that the object of adoration shared their frustration. Queen Farah’s cousin Reza Ghotbi served as director of Iran’s national broadcasting service. He recalled the time he lunched with the Imperial Family and their guests at the Caspian. All chatter and activity ceased when the all-important two o’clock news began with the usual lengthy rundown of the Shah’s latest official engagements and speeches. Troubled by the attention, the Shah warily asked, “Isn’t there any other news at your radio station?” The director returned to his office and raised the subject with one of his staff, a popular radio newscaster. “I’m not feeling very happy with this kind of news,” he said, “with this focus on the King and Queen and everything members of the Imperial Family do.” His colleague reminded him why they lavished attention on them in the first place. “We’re not like the BBC or Radio France,” he said. “If we don’t lead the news with the Shah, people will think there has been a coup d’état in Iran.”
The Shah never denied there were times when he preferred to be somewhere else living a different sort of life. “Let me tell you quite bluntly that this king business has given me personally nothing but headaches,” he once told a group of astonished journalists in New York. He was as forthright in private. “It is hardly a pleasant job,” he remarked in passing to a visiting scholar. “I can think of many more attractive kinds of work to do, here in Iran or abroad.” He was sustained only by his vision to transform his country into a modern state and restore Iran to its former greatness.
* * *
IF HE WAS sure of one thing in life it was the love he believed he shared with the Iranian people, whom he affectionately referred to as his “children.” Their communion could not possibly be grasped by foreigners or intellectuals. “You Westerners simply don’t understand the philosophy behind my power,” he said. “The Iranians think of their sovereign as a father.… Now, if to you a father is inevitably a dictator, that is your problem, not mine.”
Above all the Shah held a fervent attachment to the farr, the Persian mantle of heaven that decreed that so long as a king governed like a benevolent father and kept his people’s best interests in mind he was assured their loyalty and devotion. Force could not be used to hold the farr, and monarchs who committed unjust acts such as shedding the blood of innocents could expect to lose their throne and their life. For the Shah, the farr was the ultimate expression of the people’s will and democracy because it was a social contract based on mutual respect and trust. The Iranian people, he liked to say, “love me and will never forsake me.” “A real king in Iran is not only the political head of the nation,” he explained on another occasion. “Rather, more than anything else, he is a teacher and a leader. He is not only a person who builds roads, bridges, dams, and canals for his people, but also one who leads them in spirit, thought, and heart. This explains why, if he has the confidence of his people, the Shah in Iran can on the basis of his enormous prestige and spiritual influence initiate such fundamental and extensive programs—programs which would not be undertaken elsewhere except through revolutions and curtailments of civil and individual liberties, or through slow evolutionary processes.”
The Shah’s sentimental attachment to the farr helped explain his behavior on two earlier occasions when rivals almost chased him from the throne. In August 1953 he briefly fled Iran during a showdown with Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and left retired army general Fazlollah Zahedi and the army to restore order. In June 1963 religious unrest led by the fiery cleric Ruhollah Khomeini threatened revolution. Once again, the Shah stepped back and allowed a more seasoned and ruthless personality, this time Prime Minister Asadollah Alam, to clear the streets with grapeshot. More than anything, he dreaded the prospect of a confrontation with his people and was temperamentally unable to order his troops to open fire, even on those seeking to destroy him and overthrow the monarchy. His longest-serving advisers understood that the Shah would seek an accommodation or withdraw altogether rather than stand and fight if it meant staining the throne with blood. They fretted that he was too softhearted to rule a country with a long, tortuous history of unrest and rebellion. But the Shah did not see it that way at all. In his eyes, a national leader who used force to stay in power was no better than a dictator, and he never saw himself as one. “I am not Suharto,” he repeatedly said in reference to the Indonesian strongman whose brutal crackdown against leftist agitators cost an estimated half a million lives.
So long as he felt certain in his head and heart that he had God on his side and the Iranians at his back, the Shah ruled with confidence and vigor. But if he sensed that he no longer commanded the hearts of his people, and if doubts about his mission should creep in, he tended to waver, lose his way, and prevaricate. The withdrawal of love and support, no matter how temporary, seemed almost to unhinge him by draining him of focus, energy, and determination. A steady guiding hand was then required to steer him back on course. He was, said one government official who enjoyed his confidence, like “a lamb in lion’s clothing.” Nor was he the decisive administrator he liked to appear. He often left important decisions to the last minute or avoided making them at all. Minor problems left untended became more serious than need be. Too often, this meant that the Shah, who otherwise enjoyed a monopoly on power, risked losing momentum or ceding the initiative to stronger, more forceful personalities.
By December 1977, however, questions of temperament and leadership were abstract concerns, and the unrest of earlier decades was but a distant memory. On a recent trip to the port cities that lined the southern Persian Gulf coastline the Shah had been mightily impressed with the turnout in the streets. “In the afternoon His Imperial Majesty arrived in Kermanshah to the most spectacular display of popular enthusiasm I have ever witnessed,” noted Asadollah Alam. The Shah observed that the local Muslim clergy had been in the forefront of the demonstrations of loyalty. “It’s incredible, but now that living standards have improved it’s the mullahs who are most keen to flatter us on our achievements,” he told dinner guests. “You should have heard what their spokesmen said to me whilst I was going in to the residence.” “I had indeed heard it and was amazed,” Alam confided in his diary.
The Shah firmly believed that “95 percent of the population were in favor of the monarchy.” Asked to explain how he knew his people supported him, the Shah had a ready answer: “You can see by the look in their eyes.”
* * *
POWER MIGHT BE absolute but the Shah, an inveterate planner, had no intention of ruling until his deathbed, and for at least the past decade had talked openly about stepping down once his eldest son was ready to assume the throne.
In October 1971, during the week of the splendid celebrations for the Persian monarchy, he declared before a global television audience that he looked forward to the day when he abdicated his duties. “This is not a new idea,” he told reporters from twenty countries in town for the big party. “My father also thought of doing so.” At the Caspian Sea in the summer of 1972 he shared his thoughts with a family friend. “The time of Reza will be different than mine,” he said. “When Reza is twenty I will retire to the north and they can come and see me if they have any problems.” Again, in September 1975 he told the New York Times that he would step down once he was confident he had strengthened Iran to the point where “nothing can threaten it.” “I want to build a better country for my son to inherit than the one I inherited from my father,” he said. “When I was his age I heard voices whispering in my ear about the destiny of Iran. I want my son to inherit not dreams but the realization of a dream.” He fully intended to work himself out of a job and stage-manage an orderly transfer of power to his son.
In the spring of 1976 the Shah concluded that Iran had become too big, too complex, and too volatile for one-man rule. With oil revenues stagnant and the economy in the doldrums, the public mood was restless. Though distrustful of parliamentary democracy, which he blamed for the instability that marred his early years on the throne, the Shah concluded that it was time to “let off steam” and open up the political system for the first time since the early sixties. As a first step to reform, he eliminated some of the regime’s more unsavory features. To relieve the complaints of liberals and the urban middle class, the Shah supported new laws to protect the rights of political prisoners and outlaw torture. He invited the International Committee of the Red Cross to inspect Iranian prisons. He ordered the relaxation of censorship, encouraged public criticism of the government, and approved investigations into high-level graft. Plans were announced to return power to the provinces, cut waste, and reduce red tape.
Pleased with how this first phase of reform proceeded, one year later, in the summer of 1977, the Shah stepped back from day-to-day management of the ministries and gave his new prime minister the leeway to make decisions. Opposition groups were allowed to gather and organize so long as they did not challenge the basic precepts of the monarchy. At one time the Shah’s portrait had adorned the front pages of every Iranian newspaper every day. In the autumn of 1977 shrewd observers noticed that Queen Farah’s profile was raised and that she was speaking out on major issues of the day. Crown Prince Reza became more visible, with his first major overseas trip set for Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand in January 1978. These state visits, the first in a series planned over the next year, were to introduce the young heir to an international audience and mark the next phase in his training in kingship.
* * *
AT THE CLOSE of each day the Shah strolled back to the big house for an hour of exercise before dinner. Upstairs in the main residence, near his bedroom, he had fashioned a room the size of a large closet into a gym. His valet, Amir Pourshaja, once suggested he might like to enlarge this space and the adjoining bathroom. “No,” said the Shah, “this is more than enough space for me.” His daily workout consisted of calisthenics followed by a forty-five-minute routine with dumbbells. Pourshaja knew his master’s body well. He had trained and been certified in Austria as a masseuse and after each workout he gave the King a rubdown. At fifty-eight years old the Shah still had an enviable physique. Amir noticed that regardless of the year or season, he seemed never to lose or gain extra pounds.
After his massage, the Shah dressed for dinner and joined his wife and family members in the downstairs dining room, or he and Farah might drive to the homes of his mother and sisters for dinner. Almost invariably, they dined on traditional Persian cuisine, though the Shah took care to avoid aggravating his sensitive stomach. One meal he could not resist, even though he knew he would pay dearly for it in the morning, was kalleh pacheh or boiled mutton’s head and foot. He rarely drank alcohol and during state dinners would raise the wineglass to his lips but not sip from it—if he indulged at all it was usually with a glass of whiskey after dinner. Tonight, however, New Year’s Eve, he might make an exception. Shortly after four in the afternoon the Imperial Family and government dignitaries would drive to Mehrebad Airport to welcome the arrival of President Jimmy Carter, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and several hundred American dignitaries, news reporters, and White House staff. The president’s trip to Iran had already been postponed once, due to domestic politics. Both leaders and their advisers hoped that Carter’s visit would help smooth relations after a year of deep strain caused by sharp differences over oil prices, arms sales, nuclear power, and human rights.
The Shahanshah of Iran stood at the wheel of the Pahlavi ship of state, a most formidable structure, which on December 31, 1977, sailed through the night, lights ablaze from end to end, its bulkhead secure, its compartments watertight. There was no reason to worry—he knew the way. Now, as he neared the end of his fourth decade in power, one of the great survivors of the twentieth century seemed destined to go on and on. Only a few embittered enemies, an odd assortment of revolutionaries on the political left and right-wing religious extremists, could imagine a world without him. In recent weeks they had taken advantage of his decision to liberalize by staging protests and launching attacks against symbols of Western modernity such as cinemas, banks, and universities. From neighboring Iraq, where he had lingered in exile for the past thirteen years, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for an uprising to demolish the monarchy and establish a religious state whose laws would be based on the Muslim holy book the Quran. But beyond his immediate following Khomeini was still largely unknown inside Iran, and he faced apparently insurmountable odds against the Shah’s half-million-strong army, air force, and navy.
Nor were there any signs that the middle class, workers, and farmers, the groups that comprised the bulwarks of the royalist state, would abandon the Shah and his family. And why would they? In an uncertain world the Shah stood strong as their protector but also as the cornerstone of stability for Iran, for the Persian Gulf, and for the whole of southwestern Asia; to overthrow the Shah would be seen as a collective act of national suicide.
* * *
ATTACHED TO THE Shah’s private suite in Niavaran was a small bathroom, which included a vanity unit. One of its drawers contained several plastic bottles of pills with false labels attached to them. Only the Shah, the Queen, and several Iranian and French physicians sworn to oaths of secrecy knew their real contents. All that the valet Amir Pourshaja knew was that every five days he was required to phone in an order for refills to the local pharmacy, then send a driver down to collect the prescription. The procedure was straightforward enough—at this time in Iran medicines were sold over the counter without proof of identity or residence.
Pourshaja carefully refilled the bottles as he had been shown by the court physician, Lieutenant General Abdolkarim Ayadi. He did not know that the pills contained powerful chemicals to treat incurable lymphoma. He did not know that Iran’s King of Kings was slowly, inexorably dying of cancer.