My problem is that I haven’t enough time.
—THE SHAH
This is the juice of a sick mind.
—IMAM MUSA SADR
In 1972 Abolhassan Banisadr traveled to Najaf in Iraq to mourn the death of his father, Ayatollah Nasrollah Banisadr, a prominent clerical opponent of the Pahlavi Dynasty. By now he was living in Paris in exile, teaching economics, and thinking about Iran’s future. He was not intimidated by the Shah’s popularity or the apparent strength of the Pahlavi regime. “Ten years before the revolution, a group of us concluded the Shah’s regime was headed for serious difficulties and will end up completely lost,” he recalled. “We started from that period to create an alternative in terms of programs for action in different fields and put together a group of people ready to take over.” The exiled intellectuals studied the army and concluded that its emphasis on combating foreign threats presented a major weakness in dealing with domestic discontent. Iranian soldiers were well equipped but were not trained to fight an internal insurgency or put down an uprising. In surveying the White Revolution, Banisadr and his friends noted that many peasant families had walked off the land and moved to the cities in search of a better life. Now congregated in urban slums, they comprised a lumpen proletariat, which would eventually demand a greater share of power and resources. His conclusion was that the Shah was headed for a crisis down the road because his regime’s “social basis was shrinking.… So you see on one side a phenomenon of crumbling, and on the other side the opposition pulling itself together, developing a platform, and presenting an alternative.”
Banisadr and the other exiles recognized that the path to power lay in the streets. Equally, they understood that they lacked the leadership, charisma, and resources to mobilize vast crowds. Only a marja was capable of mounting an insurrection. Khomeini enjoyed a record of defying the Shah, but he was not considered a marja and languished in exile in Najaf. “The way we looked at Khomeini was, ‘What role could he play in a revolution?’” said Banisadr. Though Khomeini was not a marja, Banisadr and his confederates had the idea of imbuing him with the authority of one in the same way they might sell a new brand of laundry detergent. “In Khomeini we saw a voice who could reach all of Iran. And as a marja, everything he would say would have a religious message and would be accepted. If the movement’s objectives would be articulated by Khomeini, this would be a big gain. We had some thoughts but not the means to make a public discourse. That would be Khomeini’s role. Without Khomeini, it was not clear a revolution could take place.”
When he traveled to Najaf in Iraq in 1972 to mourn his father, Banisadr met with Khomeini to discuss how they might work together. The experience left Banisadr distinctly underwhelmed—he found Khomeini to be neither friendly nor collegial. “Khomeini was not one of those who believed a revolution would happen,” he recalled. “My first impression was that [he] was isolated. He was not in contact with the rest of the community. The other grand ayatollahs did not consider him part of the community. So I asked him, ‘Why is it this way?’”
“You do not know these people,” Khomeini glumly replied. “If you go along with these people you will have to go along with these people.” Khomeini liked to talk in circles. What he meant was that he would not be accepted by the other marjas unless he moderated his views, something he was clearly not prepared to do.
Banisadr returned to Najaf one year later to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Since his last visit he had read Khomeini’s thirteen-part lecture series calling for a religious dictatorship. Many of Banisadr’s leftist comrades had decided the thesis was so extreme it must be part of an elaborate forgery by Savak to discredit Khomeini as a religious fanatic. But Banisadr, with his background in religion, knew better. “You are doing a great favor to the Pahlavi government,” he warned Khomeini. “You are advocating the creation of a government by people who are so incompetent they cannot even manage the affairs of a town like Najaf, which is filled with dirt and garbage.”
If Khomeini was offended by Banisadr’s criticism, he didn’t let on. “I have written this book as an attempt to open a discussion,” he replied. “This is not the final word. It is for people like you to start thinking about forming a government.”
“Very well,” replied Banisadr, who accepted Khomeini’s flattery and his explanation that the book merely served a tactical purpose. “Very good. Please publish this.”
Then they got down to business. Banisadr and the nationalist left were good organizers but lacked a popular following among the people. They needed to forge alliances with Khomeini’s religious supporters in exile but especially with groups back in Iran who could open up the religious networks and mosques to their political activity. Khomeini’s pride and ambition, not to mention his hatred for the secular left, which he regarded as insufficiently Islamist, meant that he was much more comfortable dealing with Mehdi Bazargan’s rival offshoot the Liberation Movement of Iran. “There were some talks about the ambiguity of Khomeini’s relationship with the nationalist movement,” Banisadr recalled. To test Khomeini’s goodwill and to reassure his supporters on the left, Banisadr asked if Khomeini would be prepared to donate a percentage of his tithings to finance a propaganda effort to tarnish the Pahlavi name in Western capitals. The Grand Ayatollah swiftly gave his consent, and hundreds of thousands of dollars soon began flowing into bank accounts in Houston, Texas, where a supporter named Ibrahim Yazdi represented the American chapter of the revolutionary movement, and also in Paris, where Banisadr and his clique were based. Banisadr used the money to found a publishing house that churned out crudely effective propaganda that accused the Shah of committing monstrous human rights abuses.
Banisadr was most anxious to influence foreign press coverage of Iran. Banisadr and his colleague Sadegh Ghotzbadegh made a point of cultivating American and European reporters who covered events in Iran from their regional offices in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. They studied their reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement’s facts and figures. Banisadr became particularly close to Eric Rouleaux, a reporter from Le Monde who had covered the 1963 insurrection. He was especially pleased when his French friend, a supporter of Third World nationalism and various radical causes, wrote the first article predicting the overthrow of the Shah. Another sympathetic ear was Jonathan Randal, the former foreign correspondent for the New York Times who now reported for the Washington Post from Beirut. Randal’s critical coverage of the 1971 Persepolis celebrations had presented a devastating portrait of conditions inside Iran and helped define the Shah as a corrupt, cruel dictator. Randal became friendly with Sadegh Ghotzbadegh, a raconteur and womanizer whose romances with female Western foreign correspondents were widely known. The Iranian would drop by his bureau and charm him into writing stories about human rights in Iran. On one of his trips to Tehran, Randal even agreed to Ghotzbadegh’s request that he drive to the bazaar to collect a suitcase that turned out to be full of cash and bring it out of the country.
Back in Najaf, Khomeini made sure his thesis was republished with an innocuously worded introduction that merely explained the author’s intention “to discuss certain related matters and questions.” Copies of the book and Khomeini’s periodic statements on politics and religion were mass produced with the help of a Gestetner photostat machine set up in his compound. From there they were smuggled back into Iran, to be stashed in a warehouse in Tehran’s overcrowded and poor southern suburbs. Khomeini’s advisers also had him start recording his sermons on cassette tapes, then the latest audio technology. The tapes were flown to Beirut, West Berlin, and Paris, where they were duplicated in safe houses by sympathizers. From there the tapes were smuggled back into Iran by courier to be reproduced and distributed around the mosques and bazaars.
Khomeini’s classes in Najaf began to steadily increase in size and number. By the latter stages of his exile, the Grand Ayatollah had trained as many as five hundred mutjahid and lectured to twelve thousand religious students who made the trek over the border from Iran. Each wave of acolytes returned home filled with Khomeini’s message of hatred toward the Shah.
* * *
WHILE KHOMEINI LINGERED in exile, the Shah exploited the international scene to emerge on the world stage as a confident, seasoned statesman. In 1971 President Richard Nixon welcomed his Iranian ally’s offer to shoulder the burden of defense in the Persian Gulf at a time when the White House was focused on ending the Vietnam War and avoiding new foreign entanglements. “The Persian Gulf delivers about 70 percent of Europe’s energy needs and about 90 percent of Japan’s,” explained the Shah. “If these lines of communication are not secure, then Japan and Europe will crack. So while we are doing this for ourselves, at the same time I think we are rendering a great service to the whole of Europe and Japan.” At a time when anti-American sentiment was running high throughout Asia and the Middle East, the Shah’s staunch pro-Western credentials made him stand out as a loyal ally. In return, Nixon agreed to end restrictions on U.S. arms sales to Iran and tacitly approved the Shah’s demand that he charge higher oil prices to Western consumers to finance his country’s military buildup, nuclear program, and industrialization. “But I like him, I like him, and I like the country,” Nixon enthused. “And some of those other bastards out there I don’t like, right? I just wish there were a few more leaders around the world with his foresight.… And his ability, his ability to run, let’s face it, a virtual dictatorship in a benign way.”
The Shah’s foreign policy triumphs masked a growing malaise at home. Ten years had passed since he decided to rule and reign, and the White Revolution had achieved many of its immediate objectives. Wealthier peasant farmers tilled their own land and sent their produce to market. Women enjoyed the right to vote, divorce, work, receive an education, and secure abortions. The rising tide of prosperity enriched and enlarged the urban middle class. Even many of the Shah’s most severe critics on the left, including opposition leaders such as the Liberation Movement’s Mehdi Bazargan, worked in the private sector and put their connections and skills to good use to enjoy a high standard of living. Yet materialism brought with it a host of new problems and challenges. Many Iranians were disoriented by the pace of change and increasingly questioned the logic behind rapid modernization. They worried that it diminished and threatened family life, culture, and traditional values. The old ways still exerted a strong pull. “Our economic progress is a wonderful thing, but we are being swamped by you,” former Savak chief Hassan Pakravan told the American journalist Frances Fitzgerald. “No one cares for anything but money nowadays. We are overwhelmed by material goods, and we are losing our own values. Children don’t respect their parents. Of course, there’s nothing we can do about it. The modern world must come, and we are powerless. But what you have, is that really a way of life?”
The Shah was beginning to understand that total political power and full coffers could not solve every problem. He could impose laws but not enforce them. Despite the money he lavished on his country’s best and brightest, the elite universities remained in a constant state of upheaval and rebellion. After spending a fortune to build up the Iranian Imperial Navy, he had recently attended maneuvers during which every cannon fired had missed its target. “These are the people that I rely on in planning my foreign policy, in risking confrontation with foreign powers; and yet you can see for yourself what a bunch of cretins they’ve turned out to be,” he told Alam. He pumped billions in oil revenues into the domestic economy only to learn of food shortages and inflation. Despite thousands of new schools, rapid population growth meant the government was falling behind in its campaign to improve literacy. Many poorer peasants had been freed at great cost only to walk off the land in search of better lives in the big cities. Women emancipated a decade earlier were now covering their heads and in some cases even returning to full hijab. Recently a popular preacher had delivered a radio address without bestowing the usual blessing on the head of state. “What a farce,” he groused. “Anyone courting popularity does his damnedest to steer clear of the court.”
The proud monarch who only two years earlier had led a parade of kings, queens, and presidents at Persepolis struggled to contain the worries that kept him up at night. Even the 5- and 10-milligram capsules of Valium he took each night to combat anxiety failed to keep the insomnia at bay. Iranian students reserved a special loathing for the man who thought of himself as their father. Nothing he did for them was ever good enough. They cynically dismissed land reform, women’s emancipation, free education, free health care, and economic growth as a giant fraud perpetrated to please his American and Zionist “puppet masters.” “I believe that the peasantry are with me,” the Shah lamented, “but it is not so true of the younger intelligentsia. The younger people—they are in the National Front—have no ties to the ordinary people. They are a problem for me. Everything they have advocated I have done. We have made more reforms than they have asked for. I do not understand why they are not with me.”
The Shah was too slow to understand that his people’s spiritual malaise could not be solved with more charts, studies, projections, and forecasts. Their ailment was one of the heart and not the head. Court Minister Alam gingerly suggested that His Majesty might wish to change the way he spoke to his people. Ten years had passed since he had imposed reforms from the top down. Security was too tight. The people needed to breathe. Perhaps, recommended Alam, the time had come to “reform popular attitudes. But by subtlety; it cannot be achieved merely by issuing commands.” The real culprit, in Alam’s view, was not the Shah, whom he regarded as the visionary Iran needed, but Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, whom he caustically referred to as “old Quasimodo” and regarded as a corrosive and cynical influence in public life. Since taking office in 1965 after the assassination of his friend Ali Mansur, Hoveyda had defied the odds and retained the monarch’s confidence through several terms in office. The scion of an aristocratic family, like so many of Iran’s ruling elite, Hoveyda was also related to senior religious figures, in his case the marja Grand Ayatollah Khoi, who resided in Najaf. Hoveyda was intelligent, charming, and erudite, but also servile, obsequious, and well versed in the Persian art of court flattery.
The Shah enjoyed Hoveyda’s company and relaxed visibly in his presence. A palace aide recalled that he was once taken aback when His Majesty broke protocol and requested a whiskey for his prime minister. “They shared a love of French culture and the French language,” wrote Hoveyda’s biographer. “In Hoveyda, the Shah also found an intellectual of sound credentials, with a voracious appetite for books and ideas, who could banter about the history, culture, and politics of the West with the best of his Western counterparts. More important, Hoveyda was also accommodating toward the King’s growing appetite to concentrate more and more of the government’s daily functions in his own hands.” Smart enough not to debate the Shah in his presence, the prime minister fed the perception that he existed only to carry his master’s water. “The Shah is the Chairman of the Board and I am the Managing Director,” was how he described his role to Britain’s ambassador Antony Parsons. “Well Tony,” he said on another occasion, “you know His Majesty’s definition of a dialogue. It is—I speak, you listen. He will not change.” “Hoveyda was a very good friend,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, who served as Iran’s minister of women’s affairs. “He was charming, cultured and good with people. But he established the situation where he got technocrats to run the country. We had complete freedom to do what we loved. We had resources. We didn’t have to deal with constituencies. Just as long as we didn’t meddle in politics. The security was taken care of. But no one was taking care of the political system. Hoveyda kept saying, ‘The Shah is making all the decisions,’ which wasn’t true. He made it appear as though it was the Shah doing everything. But in three years I only had three meetings with the Shah and no direction from him.”
No one doubted Hoveyda’s competence as a manager. He had a knack for spotting talent and his cabinet was staffed with highly capable administrators and technocrats. The prime minister was smart, charming, and cultivated friendships with members of the Imperial Family, ambassadors, intellectuals, and the clergy. They tolerated his alcoholism and rumored homosexuality, though not everyone was patient or forgiving. “Amir, are you drunk already?” Ardeshir Zahedi once barked at him during a daytime reception. His door was open to all comers—even the young student revolutionary Abolhassan Banisadr had enjoyed access to Hoveyda. As early as 1959, when Banisadr was already in open revolt against the regime, he had found a sympathetic ear in Hoveyda who at the time was serving on the board of directors of the National Iranian Oil Company. “I was usually frank and ruthless in my criticism of him and the regime he served,” Banisadr later said of his encounters with Hoveyda. “He bore it all with a grin. On more than one occasion, I asked him to help free friends who had fallen into the hands of the secret police, and he usually did what he could. I grew to like him; his problem was that he had no religious faith at all.” Hoveyda was the only government official Banisadr bothered to call on before he left for exile in Paris. Hoveyda’s willingness to entertain the very agent who sought the Shah’s overthrow hinted at not only his bald cynicism—he liked to keep all his options open—but also his need to be liked even by his enemies. Perhaps the most persistent criticism of Hoveyda, the technocrat par excellence, was that no one really knew what he stood for except the maintenance of his high office with its perks and privileges.
Hoveyda encouraged the popular perception that the Shah refused to heed advice or listen to reason, and that he exhibited the tendencies of a megalomaniac. The Shah was stubborn and proud, it was true, and already far too isolated. He could be petulant and thin-skinned in the face of criticism. Far from having a closed mind, however, he enjoyed discussing and debating ideas and policies with his ministers as long as they did not oppose his wishes in public, and he showed himself open to consider any and all new concepts and proposals as long as they could strengthen Iran and improve the lives of as many Iranians as possible in the shortest possible time. His mind was like a sponge. The Shah’s main problem was that with an education no higher than that of a high school student, like so many self-taught experts he had a dangerous habit of embracing fashionable theories and accepting them as fundamental truths rather than broad-stroke policy guidelines. What he needed was a prime minister with a confident personality matched by an understated demeanor. By finessing the royal ego, lauding each of His Majesty’s new initiatives, dismissing legitimate criticisms, and offering assurances that all was well despite his own reservations to the contrary, Hoveyda did the Shah and the monarchy a grave disservice. He withheld disagreeable information that he feared might cause disfavor, agreed to carry out imperial edicts even as he consigned them to the graveyard of committees of experts, and quietly manipulated the monarch’s paperwork and instructions to his benefit. Right to the end, when not even his young friend Banisadr could save him from the executioner’s bullets, Hoveyda insisted he had just been following orders.
Alam was puzzled as to why the Shah still retained confidence in a politician whose government “should be so negligent … its indifference and, on occasion, its brute aggression toward the people remind me of the way an army of occupation might treat a nation defeated in war.” Criticizing Hoveyda, of course, allowed Alam to avoid the real elephant in the room, namely his master’s obsession with control, his chronic distrust of subordinates, and the personal insecurities that meant he preferred to surround himself with yes-men who told him what he wanted to hear. He observed on more than one occasion to the Shah that the security forces went overboard in roughing up the regime’s opponents. He worried that too many young Iranians were alienated to the point they favored the overthrow of the monarchy. Nor did the Shah object in December 1973 when Alam admitted that he feared “a growing sense of alienation between the regime and people.” “I’m afraid you’re right,” he finally conceded. “I’ve sensed the same thing myself.” They discussed the matter, and Alam felt that a turning point had been reached, that the Shah understood that materialism on its own was not a panacea. Hoveyda’s government should be replaced and a caretaker cabinet appointed to lead the country into free elections.
The U.S. intelligence community watched with interest the Shah’s repeated efforts and persistent failure to broaden his regime’s base of support among the people. “There is considerable anxiety,” reported the CIA, “that the Shah, in his impatience to move [Iran] ahead now, is failing to prepare institutions and leaders that could make [the] transition to post-Shah Iran without serious political turmoil and without serious damage to social and economic progress.” The intelligence agency took note of the “essentially negative role” played by the “educated professional class—some even from establishment families—who refuse to cooperate with the ruling elite, and the clergy, whose strength lies in the emotions of the Iranian masses and whose opposition to the Shah’s government is nearly total.” But the CIA was hampered in its ability to conduct more in-depth assessments of the domestic mood. As part of the hosting rights for two CIA listening posts that monitored Soviet missile tests in Central Asia, the Shah had extracted a concession from Washington to forgo intelligence gathering inside Iran. “Iran was in the category of states that we agreed not to conduct intense political intelligence activities,” recalled Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as President Carter’s national security adviser in the late seventies. “That left us at a disadvantage because we relied on independent observers and we had no backup of our own [to assess conditions inside Iran].”
Iran’s domestic discontents were overshadowed by the earth-shaking events of late 1973 and early 1974 in the Middle East. Simmering tensions between Israel and Egypt erupted into open warfare in October 1973. Furious that the United States airlifted military supplies to Israel, Arab states in the Middle East imposed an oil embargo that triggered panic buying in the West and sent crude prices soaring. The Shah’s decision to remain neutral in the conflict earned him Nixon’s gratitude. But he also saw an opportunity to exploit the crisis to Iran’s benefit. On December 23, 1973, he hosted a meeting of Persian Gulf oil producers who followed his suggestion that they double the price of oil for the second time in a year. The Shah’s oil coup stunned his admirers back in Washington. The “oil shock” devastated the economies of Western oil consumers even as Iran’s income from oil doubled to $4.6 billion in 1973–1974, then rocketed to $17.8 billion a year later to a total of $98.2 billion for the next five years. In just a few months the Shah had seized control of the oil markets and established himself as the dominant figure within OPEC, the oil producers’ cartel that set prices and determined levels of oil production. Rather than invest Iran’s new billions offshore in bonds, treasury notes, and real estate, the Shah decided to pump it straight back into the domestic economy to give it the push he felt was needed to break the cycle of poverty and underdevelopment. Finally, after decades of struggle and turmoil, the Shah felt himself to be untouchable and indispensable. He had broken free from the Russians, the British, and now the Americans. “Iran is not a volcano now,” he assured a visitor to Niavaran. “I want the standard of living in Iran in ten years’ time to be exactly on a level with that in Europe today. In twenty years’ time we shall be ahead of the United States.”
The Shah stood at the apex of a new world economic order. “Once dismissed by Western diplomats as an insecure, ineffective playboy-King, this emperor of oil commands new respect these days, as much for his ambitions as for his wealth,” declared Time magazine. “In the 33rd year of an often uncertain reign, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi has brought Iran to a threshold of grandeur that is at least analogous to what Cyrus the Great achieved for ancient Persia.” Bankers joked that when the Shah sneezed, Wall Street caught cold. Iran’s astonishing 33 percent economic growth rate for 1973 was outpaced by 40 percent the following year, and gross national product was set to expand at the rate of 50 percent in twelve months. The economy took off like an Apollo rocket to the moon. “We have no real limit on money,” boasted the government’s senior economist. “None.” The Shah interpreted this remark in the most literal sense. He ordered billions in new military equipment and made all elementary school education free and compulsory. Iran was not a major dairy producer, but he decreed that every schoolchild was entitled to a free glass of milk each day. He purchased a 25 percent stake in the West German steel company Krupp and spent $16 billion in the fiscal year 1974–1975 “on projects ranging from schools to hospitals.” Eager to buy international prestige and influence, the Shah contributed $700 million to the International Monetary Fund and another $1 million to the University of Southern California to endow a professorial chair in engineering. U.S. intelligence analysts were confounded by the Shah’s oil coup against his former patrons.“He was our baby, but now he has grown up,” complained a CIA official whose admission signaled that the United States had finally lost the ability to influence Iranian foreign and economic policy.
* * *
ALI KANI, A prominent member of the Iranian political establishment, stopped off in Beirut in 1973 to see his old friend Imam Musa Sadr. The two men met at the St. George Hotel, and from there drove to Musa Sadr’s residence in the capital. Although this was a social visit between two friends who had known each other since childhood, Musa Sadr also had serious business to discuss. He had a secret message he wanted Kani to pass on to the Shah that concerned the behavior of his old teacher Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.
As the sons of two of Iran’s most revered grand ayatollahs, Ali Kani and Musa Sadr had more than friendship in common. Theirs was the insular, tightly knit world of the highborn families who dominated the Iranian religious and political elites. In the early 1960s, while Musa Sadr was busy establishing himself in Lebanon, Ali Kani had served in the cabinet of his friend Asadollah Alam, whose premiership coincided with the uprising of June 1963. Kani was at Alam’s side during the showdown with Khomeini. He always believed that had Alam remained in power as prime minister he would never have allowed Khomeini to leave Iran for the relative safety and comfort of exile. “They crushed the uprising. But Alam wanted Khomeini to stay in Iran under watch. But [Alam’s successor as prime minister] Mansur asked the King to send him to Turkey.” Kani regarded the Status of Forces Agreement, which provided immunity for U.S. military personnel based in Iran, as nothing short of “a disaster” for the regime.
Through the years, Ali Kani and Musa Sadr stayed in touch. They exchanged letters and whenever Kani traveled back and forth to Paris he made sure to stop off in Beirut to see his old friend so they could compare notes on politics and religion. “Musa Sadr was a very intelligent man,” remembered Kani. “Very charismatic and attractive. He was too intelligent to be influenced by others.”
At the end of his short stay in Beirut, Musa Sadr took his friend aside and handed him a twenty-page booklet written in Arabic that contained “the concise thoughts of Khomeini.” This was the bound version of the Grand Ayatollah’s lectures calling for the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic government.
“This is the juice of a sick mind,” warned the Imam. “However you wish, by any means, let the King know about this,” he urged Kani. “Give it to your friend [the King]. Tell him to publish 200,000 copies and distribute them to the universities so the intellectuals can read Khomeini and learn who he really is.”
Ali Kani read Khomeini’s treatise on the plane trip back to Tehran. What he read shocked him to the core and he instinctively understood why the Imam wanted the Shah to read the tract. It was imperative that he understand the nature of the threat he faced in Najaf. Once back home, Kani wrote an executive summary of the text in Persian and took it to the palace.
“The Shah read it and he loved it,” Kani recalled. The Shah understood that if handled the right way, Khomeini’s thesis calling for a clerical dictatorship could expose the idol of Iranian youth as a religious fanatic and dangerous heretic. He instructed Prime Minister Hoveyda to publish half a million copies of the booklet and spread them around the universities, bazaars, and mosques—anywhere the people could learn for themselves the truth about the elderly cleric who presented himself as a benign champion of social justice and liberty.
“The next thing I learned, it was with the prime minister,” said Kani, who fell into a state of despair when he learned the news. The two men had a long-standing rivalry that had recently ended with a final bitter falling-out and Kani’s decision to leave political life. “And Hoveyda sent the plan to a committee to ‘study.’” Hoveyda had a standing habit of agreeing with the Shah to his face and then taking the opposite action in private. He regularly sabotaged proposals and plans that he felt undermined his authority, advanced the ambitions of his rivals, or threatened his own agenda. The prime minister’s three-man committee was composed of reformed Communists who had been turned by Savak and now worked for the regime. But they were still atheists who cared little for Iran’s religious traditions. Months passed while they dithered over what to do. Eventually they chose what they thought was the safest option and decided to recommend suppressing the report altogether. “They maintained that the text would only promote Khomeini, give him a platform, and they opposed publication,” said Kani, who personally blamed Hoveyda for what happened next.
In the hands of the regime, the text could have been a powerful weapon to force a public discussion about Khomeini’s true intentions. Instead, its suppression only increased its currency as a forbidden tract in the seminaries. University students, who never read the thesis, remained in the dark about its central message.
“Musa Sadr understood the influence of this sick mind and the potential for his ideas to spread,” said Ali Kani. So, too, it might be said, did the Shah.
* * *
THE PAHLAVIS GATHERED on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf in spring 1974 to celebrate the Nowruz holiday, which fell on March 21. In the eight weeks since his initial diagnosis for lymphoma, the Shah had not felt the need to start the anticancer treatments required to manage his condition.
Events on Kish soon forced his hand.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 9, the Pahlavis were about to leave their beach retreat on Kish Island and fly back to Tehran when General Ayadi startled Alam with the request that he urgently send for Professor Jean Bernard, a renowned hematologist who worked in a hospital in Paris. The swelling in the Shah’s abdomen had apparently reappeared. By strange coincidence Asadollah Alam, his closest aide and oldest confidant, was also being treated for a similar form of rare and incurable blood cancer, though without either his or the Shah’s knowledge. Alam’s Iranian physician, Dr. Abbas Safavian, had successfully persuaded Bernard and his young protégé Dr. Georges Flandrin not to tell their patient the truth about his condition; Alam knew he was ill but did not know his condition was incurable. Now General Ayadi asked Alam to send for Bernard and Flandrin at once, though he withheld the real reason for his request. Alam observed that the Shah remained his usual calm self. All that he said as they flew out was that he wanted the island’s construction projects hurried up: “I want them finished in my lifetime.”
The French physicians left Paris amid great secrecy on May 1, 1974. When their Air France flight landed at Mehrebad Airport they were greeted on the tarmac by Dr. Safavian, Alam’s doctor, who explained that they had been summoned to examine the court minister. Out of his earshot, Bernard confided to his younger colleague that this seemed improbable because Alam’s health problems were well known to them. Only when they reached Alam’s house did the minister himself reveal the real purpose of their visit, and that they had been called to see “the boss.” From there the doctors were ferried to Niavaran, entering the compound’s modest right-side entrance, whose lower driveway led to the old Qajar palace, where the Shah maintained his office. Through this entrance it was possible to smuggle visitors into and out of the palace compound without alerting anyone in the main family residence, which sat a few hundred yards up the slope behind a bank of plane trees. From there they walked up the hill to the big house. Georges Flandrin recalled the sensation of seeing the legendary Shah in the flesh for the first time. He and Bernard were surprised and impressed when the Shah casually related his symptoms to them. The two doctors surmised they were dealing with a remarkably well-informed and well-read patient.
Neither the Shah nor Ayadi mentioned their previous visit to Fellinger. This was in keeping with the monarch’s preferred way of doing business. He liked to consult different experts about the same problem and get a variety of opinions that would help him reach his own determination. In this case, he wanted Bernard and Flandrin to tell him what they thought was wrong. They drew blood, performed their tests, and returned to inform General Ayadi that the Shah had lymphoma. Ayadi did not register surprise but insisted they not mention the word “cancer” to the patient. The formal diagnosis they eventually settled on was “Waldenstrom’s disease,” a technical term used to describe cancer of the blood. Still, it defied belief that the Shah, when presented with their conclusions, did not grasp their meaning. Unfortunately for the doctors, at this exact same time Waldenstrom’s disease had been attributed as the cause of death of France’s president Georges Pompidou, and the Shah had followed the Pompidou case with great interest. He and Alam had both expressed admiration for the president’s decision to conceal his disease from the French people: his honorable decision to die in the saddle in the spring of 1974 showed that it was possible for a head of state to work with dignity right up to the end.
In May 1974 the burden of knowledge was still limited to the Shah, General Ayadi, Jean Bernard, Georges Flandrin, and most likely Alam, though nowhere in his diaries did he reveal his knowledge. Alam arranged for the doctors to treat the Shah either in the same house he rented in northern Tehran; in a small room at Saadabad Palace; in the main residence at Niavaran, which was usually quiet when the Queen and her children were away on duty or at school; or in a safe house in northern Tehran. Bernard and Flandrin started treatment by prescribing a daily dosage of three chlorambucil tablets and monitoring the patient’s progress from Paris. There was little else they could do but manage the disease until it reached the next critical stage. They returned to Tehran in September. By now three others were privy to the secret: Dr. Abbas Safavian; his French mentor Dr. Paul Milliez; and most likely the unknown Iranian official whose residence in northern Tehran was used as the doctors’ safe house when in Tehran.
Bernard and Flandrin saw the Shah again in January 1975 at St. Moritz during his annual ski holiday. They arrived at a particularly sensitive time for the world economy: financial markets were on edge because of the Iranian monarch’s refusal to countenance lower oil prices. Statesmen including President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Pompidou’s successor, and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger flew to Switzerland to see the Shah and lobby their national interests. The doctors’ visit to St. Moritz, an area saturated with television camera crews and journalists, entailed an extraordinary level of risk, but the Shah displayed his usual sangfroid and carried on as usual. Flandrin watched in horror as he barreled past him down the slopes when both men knew a serious fall could fatally rupture his spleen.
Giscard d’Estaing later recalled that during their discussion he had asked the Shah why he was in such a hurry to get things done back home. The Shah told the French president that he preferred to step down sooner but knew that his son was too young and inexperienced to take over. He said he was determined to stay on and put in place the building blocks for Iran’s transformation to a modern industrialized state. More than anything, he made clear, what was needed was time.
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FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS in a small office staffed by a single private secretary, Queen Farah’s Special Bureau by 1974 boasted a $5 million annual operating budget and employed forty office workers to manage her caseload, travel schedule, twenty-six patronages, and respond to the staggering fifty thousand letters a year that poured in addressed to her. Writing a letter to the King or Queen was a Persian tradition, and many of those Farah’s office received were appeals for help. “We will have to continue to do this until our welfare system is more spread out,” she explained. “Many problems touch me and I can be a good advocate,” she said. “My husband is interested in Iran’s GNP. I am interested in its GNH—Gross National Happiness.” Not since Catherine the Great of Russia had the world known a female sovereign entrusted with as much influence and as many resources. By now Farah had emerged as a political force in her own right. Each week she received Prime Minister Hoveyda in audience to discuss policy initiatives. She lobbied government ministers to support her causes and worked the phones to cut through red tape. She enjoyed influence at every level of the national bureaucracy. She learned the hard way that the more active she was the more people depended on her, which in turn meant more problems arrived at her door.
The Queen was sensitive to charges that the White Revolution had disrupted traditional life. Tehran’s building boom blighted the capital with smog, construction, and traffic congestion. “The only beautiful thing we had in Tehran was the view of the mountains,” she said. “And I didn’t want people to build higher, to ruin the view.” Flying back and forth between engagements in her helicopter, she scouted the horizon for land that could be turned into parks. “I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of other countries.” One of her triumphs was the transformation of a horse race track in Tehran’s western quarter into a grand park. The Shah was traveling in Europe when his wife heard the land was about to be turned into another concrete monolith. She wrote him a letter urging him to dedicate the grounds as the centerpiece of a campus dedicated to the arts, culture, and education. But when it came to real estate even the Queen’s influence was limited. She opposed construction of Tehran’s InterContinental Hotel, condemning it as an eyesore, but the project went ahead anyway. In Mashad her efforts to preserve the ancient bazaar were foiled when the local governor proceeded with demolition. She was horrified when she learned only after the fact that hundreds of houses and shops had been bulldozed in an egregious act of vandalism that helped turn local sentiment against the regime.
Day-to-day operations within the Queen’s Special Bureau were managed by a secretary appointed at her husband’s discretion. In the early seventies the job was filled by Karim Pasha Bahadori. He was later replaced by Hushang Nahavandi, the scholar and chancellor who had welcomed the Shah onto the grounds of Pahlau University in April 1971. “He was very hardworking and the head of my office,” Farah remembered, though she was also aware of Nahavandi’s abrasive personal style. “People said that he was using my office as a stepping-stone to becoming prime minister. He had friends but he was not popular.” Farah’s cousin Reza Ghotbi, her closest confidant, was appointed Managing Director of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) in 1969. From his sinecure he influenced the media and cultural affairs with his liberal views. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of Shia Islam’s preeminent scholars, was another prominent adviser. Nasr made Farah’s acquaintance when he returned to Iran in the early sixties after studying at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I met her and she became very interested in my devotion to Persian culture,” Nasr remembered. “For many years in the 1960s and seventies I used to cooperate with her very closely on projects such as saving old crafts and urban planning.”
The Queen’s party, though never formally declared, stood for more political freedom, restraints placed on Savak, and an end to censorship. Liberals argued that these reforms were essential if the monarchy was to stay relevant in the affections of a population becoming steadily younger, more educated, and more worldly. Many intellectuals and even some leftists who could not abide the Shah were prepared to set aside their qualms to work for his wife. Consciously or not, Farah replicated the role of intermediary and mediator her husband had carved out during Reza Shah’s reign forty years earlier. “The Queen,” said Reza Ghotbi, “was always the person to whom intellectuals would go for support, to get her protection against the government, Savak, the police, so she was involved and concerned and in contact with these people.”
Farah used her influence at court and her back channel to Parviz Sabeti to quietly help artists, writers, playwrights, and poets arrested or harassed by the security forces. “They once arrested a man and gave him three years in jail for reading Chekhov!” she said, her voice rising in incredulity. “Can you believe it? I intervened on his behalf and he was released.” The acclaimed artist Zenderoudi turned to her when he was arrested on the streets of Tehran for having shoulder-length hair, taken to a police station, and forcibly shorn. “Furious, I spoke to my husband about it,” said Farah. The Shah agreed to sack the national chief of police. But not even his wife was immune from Savak’s heavy-handed tactics. Before the Queen attended public events, her staff forwarded the names of attendees so they could be prescreened. But her attendance at the opening of a new art gallery was marred when security agents prevented some guests from entering the building and subjected others to humiliating interrogations. One of her oldest friends, Fereydoun Djavadi, now lecturing at the University of Tehran, was approached by a Savak agent who pressed him to become an informant. Djavadi refused and demanded the man leave his office. This sort of intimidation, directed at someone who regularly socialized with the King and Queen, sent the chilling message that no one was beyond reach or surveillance.
The Queen drew the lightning for her husband whom establishment conservatives were loath to criticize. The ulama were disturbed that a woman should occupy such a prominent role in national affairs and speak out on family issues, which they regarded as their prerogative. Within the regime, conservatives such as Ardeshir Zahedi blamed Farah for giving false hope to the same subversives they had helped crush twenty years earlier. “Why do you hire so many leftists?” he once challenged her. But Zahedi’s criticism could also have been directed at Court Minister Alam, another rival, whose deputy, the former minister of justice, had previously been a high-ranking member of the Communist Tudeh Party. The Shah’s preference was to co-opt as many leftists as possible. He viewed their placement at all levels of government not as evidence of a conspiracy but as a sign of progress—finally, the intellectuals were coming around. If the Queen hired former Marxists and Maoists it was with her husband’s express permission. Foreign diplomats to the Pahlavi Court welcomed her moderating influence. “I saw the Empress as the perfect complement to the Shah,” wrote Britain’s ambassador Tony Parsons. “Where he inspired awe and fear, she inspired love and affection. Beautiful, intelligent, artistic, compassionate, she seemed to have a remarkably free and open relationship with her husband. The general view was that she was one of the very few people who could speak their minds to him and that her influence was beneficial.”