Right across Islam, the mullahs are doomed.
—THE SHAH
People are turning to Islam.
—GRAND AYATOLLAH KAZEM SHARIATMADARI
In centuries past the Persian Gulf island of Kish had prospered as a trading port and pirate anchorage. When the Shah first saw Kish in the late sixties the island had fallen on hard times, reduced to a few settlements that survived on fishing and smuggling. He was entranced, however, and decided that Kish’s long beaches, temperate winter climate, and strategic location sixteen miles off Iran’s southern coast made it the ideal venue for a holiday home and a convenient base from which to visit nearby ports and military and oil installations. He also hoped to revitalize the island by establishing it as a mecca for European and regional tourism. The Pahlavis flew down to Kish in March 1976 to spend the Persian New Year Nowruz holidays in their seaside palace on the western shore, a large whitewashed bungalow nestled amid sand dunes. The palace’s strikingly modern design was “simple, sharply angled, steeply gabled, and with a retreating, pyramidal formation of balconies, those at the top being set back far from those at the base.” Kish Palace had the ambience of a big beach house with children and animals running around and toys littering the public rooms. The Queen rode her bicycle through the corridors. “Kish was fantastic,” she said. “Architecturally it was very nice. We swam but we were very careful because there were sharks.” Her husband was not deterred and swam out as far as he could, his head spotted at a center of a bobbing circle of Colonel Djahinbini’s bodyguards.
While his guests enjoyed themselves on the beach, the Shah reached a fateful decision about his future. Thirteen years after the army crackdown that paved the way for personal rule, and more than two years since Court Minister Alam first advised him to start sharing power, the Shah decided to embark on the immensely difficult task of reforming the political system to allow for a greater measure of democracy. His health problems and the succession were his foremost concerns, but he was also disturbed by the economic convulsions set in motion by the oil boom, realizing that “an informed and urbanized society could not be run in the old way.” The Shah followed his usual pattern of establishing a committee of experts to consider the problem and make a series of recommendations. Their report made for sober reading. They pointed out that the Shah faced a daunting series of challenges: economic problems, institutional corruption, political stagnation, youth rebellion, popular resentment of foreign and especially American influence, and the emergence of an urban proletariat with all the makings of a revolutionary underclass. Pressure for reform was coming from different directions. Since the Shah had so far failed to build independent political institutions that could outlast him, the survival of the Pahlavi state still relied to a large extent on the quiescence of three traditional groups: the ulama; the merchants, or bazaaris; and intellectuals. The Shah believed that the 1963 crackdown, the White Revolution, and the oil boom had eliminated the potential for a repeat of the coalition that led the 1905–1906 revolution. By 1976, however, each of these three groups was disillusioned enough with the Shah’s rule to set aside their differences and start a mobilization against the state. The complaints of the clergy and intellectuals were well known. Less understood were the fears and insecurities of the guardians of the old economy, the merchants whose way of life was threatened by the emergence of Pahlavi state power, big corporations, and foreign investment.
If the mosque was Iran’s beating heart, the bazaar was the lung that drew in commerce and exhaled prosperity to everyone’s benefit. “The bazaar is not just a collection of shops, as it might appear at first sight,” wrote an Iranian journalist. “In it there are merchants worth hundreds of millions of dollars as well as small businessmen, artisans, craftsmen and a whole army of middlemen. The bazaar also invests in agriculture, the building sector and, in recent years, the nation’s expanding industries.” The bazaars were built beside the mosques and for good reason: the ulama relied on the merchant class to handle their business transactions and provide them with banking and investment advice. As late as 1976 fully 80 percent of clergy income was reinvested in charities, religious schools, publishers, and theological colleges. Merchant-clergy relations extended beyond commerce. The bazaaris played an important role in helping the ulama mobilize large crowds for religious processions. In Tehran, for example, the mullahs could expect to call on five thousand agents from the bazaar to help them organize annual big religious processions that typically drew tens of thousands of participants during the holy months of Muharram and Ramadan. The Tehran bazaar’s network of operatives extended deep into the southern and eastern suburbs, where Khomeini supporters predominated. In the absence of democracy, the bazaaris found it convenient to use “the religious processions and leaders for political purposes” and formed tactical political alliances with the mullahs. The mosques were run by their relatives, clients, and customers and served as a convenient means to an end, not least because religious devotees were a captive audience that could be readily mobilized in support of a good cause. “Politically, it is the bazaar that influences the Shiite clergy and not vice versa,” noted an Iranian observer. “This is because the bazaar, in addition to holding the purse-strings, has all the networks … and is also capable of doing something concrete and valuable by closing down. Without the active backing of the bazaar virtually no section of the clergy could wield political influence for any length of time.”
The Shah and his ministers, determined to build a strong, centralized state on the French model, saw the bazaaris as an impediment to modernity and reform. “The Iranian government, on the other hand, has developed an increasing fascination for economic ‘etatisme’, complete with ‘planning’ laws to protect the consumer and institutions needed to consolidate its domination of the nation economy,” observed Kayhan. “This trend was accelerated as the flow of oil money, together with an equally profuse flow of Western-oriented technocrats, enabled the government to assume the role of Providence itself.” The bazaaris protested when the government asked small businesses to report their total number of employees so that even temporary workers could be paid social security. Iranians were by nature suspicious of central authority and resented clumsy official efforts to impose and collect taxes or interfere in price-fixing. The Ministry of Commerce further angered the business community by accusing shopkeepers and merchants of greed and graft, then hiring zealous students to harass anyone they suspected of overcharging and contributing to inflation. The government’s shock tactics hurt profits and drove many bazaaris into politics for the first time since the early sixties.
The old merchant class worried that the Shah’s economic reforms threatened their power and wealth. The injection of billions of dollars in oil revenues into manufacturing, textiles, petrochemicals, and the auto industry, but especially the introduction of new rules and regulations to introduce modern taxation and banking systems, directly threatened the living standards and profits of the bazaaris, who adhered to the slogan that “government is best that governs least.” As long as the general economy prospered, the merchants held their fire. But the Shah and his ministers miscalculated when they decided to inject most of the country’s oil stimulus back into the domestic economy. They rejected the alternative course of action, which was to temporarily invest oil revenues abroad until a domestic infrastructure was in place to safely absorb and distribute the money. The consequences of the decision to spend everything at once soon became apparent. “The cost of living in Iran—where more than 60 percent of the families have a subsistence level income of $15 a week—is jumping almost daily and is expected to rise soon to 20 percent above what it was last year,” the New York Times reported in October 1974. “Prices for staple foods, textile goods and home appliances have been soaring, in some cases to 100 percent above last year’s levels. A black market has developed to circumvent the Government’s price controls.” Other problems caused by the oil boom included shortages of affordable housing, basic foodstuffs, and skilled labor. While poor Iranians suffered, Tehran’s northern hills became a flashy showcase for the nouveaux riches, whose boorish behavior shocked traditional tastes. “There’s something a little desperate in the air,” observed Newsweek magazine. “The spiraling price of oil has made Tehran a boom town reminiscent of San Francisco in the days of the great Oil Rush. Hordes of bankers, brokers, super-salesmen and carpetbaggers of every description fill the three major hotels to overflowing.… By day a haze of smog drifts skyward against the magnificent backdrop of the Alborz Mountains. By night the city’s restaurants and nightclubs are jammed with expense-account tycoons wolfing down caviar and stuffing wads of money into the bosoms of belly dancers.”
Boom was followed in short order by bust. Iran’s economy was left perilously exposed when Western oil consumers, their economies battered by high oil prices, entered recession and sharply reduced spending on fuel imports. For the Shah, who had personally approved billions in new expenditures, the unexpected dip in oil revenues had immediate political consequences. His main objective until now, observed Newsweek, “was to raise Iran’s standard of living fast enough to prevent his subjects from falling into the temptation of organizing a revolution of their own against him.” Court Minister Alam was beside himself with worry. He understood that the social contract between the Shah and his people was at risk of dissolving: “I genuinely fear that this may be the first vague rumbling of impending revolution.”
The Shah suspected a plot. Three years earlier, he had issued Western oil companies with an ultimatum: surrender production rights or leave the country. The companies had settled for a new deal by which they ceded the right to produce oil in Iran in return for the right to sell Persian crude on the world market. The problem was that the oil companies were not obliged to take to market quantities of oil they couldn’t sell. With global markets glutted, they preferred not to place new orders with the National Iranian Oil Company until consumer demand in the West picked up. The result was that Iran’s national oil company was left with many millions of barrels of unsold oil. The Shah suspected the oil companies were punishing him for his decision to nationalize production and end their lucrative pumping rights.
The Shah’s next two missteps were entirely self-inflicted. In an attempt to distance the crown from his government and stay relevant in a rapidly changing society, in March 1975 he abolished Iran’s two nominal political parties and replaced them with a single party, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. In theory, the “King’s Party” was supposed to inoculate the throne from the threat of future social unrest, bring the crown closer to the people, and prepare the Iranian nation for a more open, democratic political system. But the Shah utterly failed to communicate that vision to his people, who interpreted the formation of Rastakhiz as a final, brazen attempt to bury their cherished 1906 Constitution. The Shah’s next folly was to approve a proposal to scrap the Islamic Hegira calendar and replace it with the Persian Imperial calendar, which dated back to the coronation of Cyrus the Great in 599 BC. This gesture to mark the Pahlavi Dynasty’s half-century celebrations in 1976 caused needless offense to religious conservatives and confused the public—Iranians went to bed in the year 1355 and woke the next morning in the year 2535. By now it was clear that the Shah and his chief minister had ruled in isolation for too long. The Shah’s public pronouncements hinted as much. “My motto is: ask the advice of the technocrats and … well, just do the opposite and you’ll succeed,” he boasted. Another time he said, “I not only make the decisions, I do the thinking.”
These debacles suggested the Shah was losing touch. Years earlier, Britain’s ambassador Sir Denis Wright had fretted that he “was taking on too much, he wouldn’t delegate.… He had got into a position where he was taking all the small decisions, all sorts of decisions, and no man could cope with that. What one was frightened of was that he would do something silly because he just hadn’t got the knowledge, and might resort to brinkmanship in a way which would get him into serious trouble.”
* * *
WHILE IRAN’S ECONOMY weakened, popular interest in religion gathered strength as Muslim clerics rejected modernization, which they associated with corruption, income inequality, and political repression. The phenomenon was hardly limited to Iran: in the 1970s tens of millions of Sunni and Shia Muslims shared a horror of Western-style corporate capitalism. They instead found solace in tradition and the old ways. “People are turning to Islam because they recognize that modernization and development have not brought peace of mind,” observed Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari. “It takes religion to do that.” In November 1974 the authorities in Saudi Arabia reported a surge in attendance at the annual hajj, the pilgrimage by observant Muslims to Mecca’s Grand Mosque, the holiest site in Islam, whose Kaaba, a fifty-foot-high cloth-covered stone structure, was revered as the “House of God.” Each successive hajj broke the record of the previous year until November 1977, when an estimated 1.6 million pilgrims gathered on the plain of Arafat, a barren field twelve miles east of Mecca, to recite verses from the holy book the Quran and to pray for forgiveness of their sins. Their devotions symbolically represented both an end and a beginning: the end of centuries of decline and the beginning of a new, more militant phase in the history of a faith that had emerged from the deserts of western Arabia in the seventh century.
Nowhere was the pace of Western-style development as rapid, or the side effects of the oil boom more keenly felt, than in Iran, where religious sentiment quickened in response to a slowdown in the economy. The first sign of unrest came in June 1975, when supporters of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini staged demonstrations at the Feiziyah seminary in Qom to commemorate the twelfth anniversary of the Fifteen Khordad uprising. Iran, cried the students, was “like a harlot running after the evil ways of the West.” The Shah initially interpreted the unrest as a last gasp by “the unholy alliance of black reactionist[s] and stateless Reds.” Khomeini’s name had recently been raised in his presence. “Khomeini?” he asked. “No one mentions his name any more in Iran, except, perhaps, the terrorists. The so-called Islamic Marxists pronounce his name every now and then. That’s all.” But Court Minister Alam’s diaries traced the gradual realization on the part of both men that old forces were starting to stir and that the ground beneath their feet had shifted. On April 12, 1976, the Shah told his minister that he had interceded on behalf of Grand Ayatollah Khoi with Saddam Hussein, the young Iraqi strongman who had recently launched a crackdown against his country’s Shia population. But he said he doubted the Iraqis would pay attention: “Right across Islam, the mullahs are doomed.” Then, on the twenty-sixth, Alam delivered a speech at Pahlavi University in Shiraz, where he was “rather alarmed to see so many of the girls wearing the veil.”
The revival of popular interest in Islam was not confined to the poor and uneducated. Members of the government and top-ranking generals made pilgrimages to the holy sites and joined Quran study groups. Attendance at Friday prayers marked atonement and was a way for the wealthy and privileged to show solidarity with the less well-to-do. “There seems to be a need for religion, as if we have moved too fast in a direction that is not native to us,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, Iran’s minister for women’s affairs and a self-proclaimed feminist. She spoke from personal experience, having visited holy shrines in Iraq and completed the hajj. “I found it in myself,” she told the New York Times. The Shah saw attitudes like this as evidence of backsliding. In October 1976 he erupted when Alam broke the news that a party of society ladies led by his sister Princess Fatemeh and his mother-in-law, Madame Diba, requested use of a 707 army plane to fly them to the holy city of Mashad, where they planned a pilgrimage. “Do they suppose the military have nothing better to do than to act as courier to a bunch of redundant old bags in search of God’s mercy!” the Shah snapped. Still, nothing prepared him for the most bitter blow, the decision by his daughter Shahnaz to reject secular life and become a religious convert. The beautiful young woman who at one time had resembled a San Francisco flower child now covered herself head to toe in black, her long tresses hidden by a flowing chador.
* * *
PRINCESS SHAHNAZ’S CONVERSION from royal rebel to religious revolutionary mirrored the experiences of her generation of young, well-heeled northern Tehranis. Raised in the gilded ghettos of Tajrish and Niavaran, cut off from their cultural roots, educated in the world’s finest universities, they returned home surprised to learn that they lived in a developing country with serious social problems. They cast the Shah in the role of villain and held him responsible for more than two thousand years of poverty and illiteracy. Anxious to identify with the masses and their deprivations, these sons and daughters of privilege exchanged one set of drag for another, donning austere Muslim garb as a way of distancing themselves from everything their parents held dear. Few had ever opened a Quran, and fewer still had any in-depth knowledge of Shia theology, but in their rebellious naïveté they rushed to embrace the latest opiate. “Young professional people want to escape the establishment,” said Karim Pakravan, the son of General Hassan Pakravan, the former Savak chief. He had been raised in comfort and privilege but he too felt no compunction in rejecting the security offered by the Pahlavi state. “The establishment is everybody who has real power. In one way or another, either morally or financially, it is corrupt. We are not brave enough to join the opposition, but by being at the university we maintain a passive opposition. Our case against the government is lack of freedom.”
In the months that preceded his marriage to Princess Shahnaz, Khosrow Djahanbani had moved into the home of his fiancée’s cousin. Prince Patrick Ali was the son of the Shah’s late brother Prince Ali Reza, killed twenty years earlier in a plane crash. During the brief interregnum between his father’s death and the birth of Crown Prince Reza, Patrick Ali had been recognized as the legitimate heir to the Peacock Throne. Raised a Catholic—his mother, Christiane Choleski, was Polish—the prince lived in San Francisco in the late sixties, where he studied Taoism and became interested in all religions. After returning to Iran he immersed himself in Islam as a student of Ayatollah Malayeri, a radical cleric, and began publicly criticizing his uncle’s regime as unjust and corrupt. At the time he was in a relationship with Catherine Adl, the daughter of Professor Yahya Adl, the Shah’s surgeon and one of the monarch’s closest male friends. Their relationship ended soon after a rock climbing accident that left Cathy paralyzed. The spirited young woman had been an accomplished equestrienne. Now confined to a wheelchair, she fell into despair and drug addiction.
Cathy Adl eventually married Bahman Hojat, a fellow drug addict and the son of a major general in the Shah’s army. Against the odds, she became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. The couple weaned themselves off drugs and followed Patrick Ali’s example by embracing political Islam. But they went one step farther in 1975, when they fled to the hills with a cache of guns and explosives and declared their intention to overthrow the state. They didn’t get very far—Cathy was crippled and the couple had brought along their baby girl and his son from an earlier marriage—but they still managed to ambush and kill several rural police officers. The security forces eventually tracked them down, cornering them in a cave, where they were shot to death in a final blaze of gunfire. The children were found alive, hidden beneath their parents’ corpses.
The tragedy in the cave stunned Pahlavi high society. The King and Queen had known Cathy since childhood and considered her a part of their extended family. The depths of her sudden, ferocious turn were almost impossible to fathom. The tragedy led to a bitter generational family rift. Prince Patrick Ali issued a public denunciation of his uncle’s regime, an act of defiance that led to his arrest and imprisonment in Evin Prison. The onetime heir to the Peacock Throne claimed he was interrogated for seventeen days and “psychologically tortured, notably with a fake execution.” As soon as he was released he was placed under house arrest to prevent further scandal. U.S. intelligence sources reported back to the State Department that Princess Sarvanaz, the daughter of Prince Abdul Reza, the Shah’s half brother, declared she hated her uncle and “would like to lead a revolution to overthrow the government.” Most affected by the deaths were Princess Shahnaz and Khosrow Djahanbani, who had counted Cathy Adl and her husband as among their closest friends. Their response to the carnage was to emulate their friends’ example by converting to Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s brand of fundamentalist Islam.
The Shah was deeply hurt and bewildered by his daughter’s rejection. In June 1975 Alam witnessed a heated exchange between the pair at the dinner table, where they bickered over “the recent outrages by Muslim fanatics (outright lunatics I would call them).” Shahnaz vigorously defended her friends even though they had shot to death several farmers and gendarmes during a short-lived rebellion. Alam was so incensed that he cut in to deliver a lecture on what he regarded as the true meaning of Islam. Looking directly at her, he told the princess that religious fanatics should be sent to psychiatric wards or given the lash in a military prison. “This put the Princess in her place,” he observed, “and much to His Imperial Majesty’s relief she preferred to change the subject.”
Though Khosrow Djahanbani proved himself a reliable and loving stepfather to his stepdaughter Mahnaz, his influence over her mother caused great alarm at court. Despite rejecting the Pahlavi inheritance, the couple insisted on maintaining their right as members of the Imperial Family to reside at Saadabad for free. They even sought permission to raise a wall around the couple’s villa, though their request was rejected by Alam on the grounds that no walls were permitted within the park. Djahanbani sent his wife to request more pocket money from her father and lobbied for state support in a harebrained scheme to import luxury motorbikes into Iran. More serious were his ties to the Mujahedin terrorists, who assassinated government and security officials, ambushed police officers, murdered American military personnel, and were dedicated to overthrowing the monarchy. If the Shah was looking for evidence of treason he need only lock eyes with the brooding young man who stared across from him at his own dinner table.
The Shah tried to be philosophical. “It is human nature to be in opposition to society and its values for a certain time,” he admitted in an interview. “That certain time often coincides with the years of youth—exactly at the time some of our children are about to go abroad to pursue their studies, thus virtually suspending their time with their families and their country.” Privately, he struggled to understand why so many educated students from Iran’s best families not only rejected him but also wanted to burn down their inheritance. Their willingness to die for their cause appalled but also impressed him.
* * *
HE HAD NEVER enjoyed a strong constitution, and the barrage of daily stress now began to aggravate his lymphoma.
During their first few visits to Iran, French physicians Jean Bernard, Georges Flandrin, and Paul Milliez had agreed with Dr. Abbas Safavian, the specialist treating Court Minister Alam for his own terminal blood disease, that the monarch’s personal doctor, General Ayadi, was incapable of providing the right palliative care. Ayadi’s valise was crammed with so many potions, pills, and creams that they lent him the air of the village quack rather than physician to a king. The French team expressed concern that the Shah was not receiving the correct dosage of medication. They observed that Ayadi appeared anxious not to be assigned blame if anything went wrong. The Shah agreed with Bernard’s recommendation that his junior colleague Flandrin should take over supervision of his treatment and progress. Flandrin flew out to Tehran on February 19, 1975, and in total made forty-seven secret trips to Tehran until his final visit at the height of the revolution in December 1978.
Flandrin’s schedule rarely varied. He left Paris on the third Saturday of each month and was back at his office each Monday morning to make sure no one noticed his absence. He usually traveled alone but from time to time was accompanied by Jean Bernard or Paul Milliez. On occasion, he might make two trips to the palace over a two- or three-day period. When he departed Paris, Flandrin drove away from Saint-Louis Hospital at midday for Charles de Gaulle Airport, boarded the afternoon Air France flight to Manila via Tehran, and disembarked at Mehrebad Airport after dark. Flandrin traveled as discreetly as possible, always sitting in the front row of first class so he was the first passenger to exit the aircraft. At the bottom of the gangway he was met by a car with flashing lights sent by Colonel Djahinbini. Their nighttime drives from the airport to the safe house sometimes involved a change of vehicles to shake off tailgaters. After a short and difficult night’s sleep, Flandrin was up at dawn for his early morning appointment. Depending on the Shah’s routine he was taken either to Niavaran; to Saadabad, where a small bedroom was set aside for his use; or to another safe house.
Flandrin’s movements into and out of the palace grounds were carefully choreographed. Shortly after dawn two cars would approach Niavaran’s lower right-side entrance. Either Colonel Djahinbini or one of his deputies watched from the shadows as General Ayadi, in the first car, stopped at the gate to present his papers for inspection. But the second car, with Flandrin, never stopped and was briskly waved through by the guards. The Shah’s chief bodyguard preferred not to know what was going on. “I knew they were doctors,” recalled Djahinbini. “I saw them at least once a month. Sometimes they came in with lots of equipment like microscopes to check blood but I never asked why they were there. I could have given their names to my friends in the Imperial Guard who were studying in Paris, and they could have found out immediately who they were. But I didn’t. I didn’t know they specialized in cancer. I didn’t want to ask.”
The Shah’s blood samples were sent to Paris from a medical laboratory in Tehran under the name of his valet, Amir Pourshaja. Every five days Pourshaja sent a driver to a local pharmacy to pick up the phoned-in refills of chlorambucil. General Ayadi was supposed to oversee the tests and refills. “Each bottle lasted five days,” said Pourshaja. “I called the pharmacy and sent the driver to get the pills. Dr. Ayadi chose the medicine.” But when Flandrin visited the Shah at the Dizin ski field he noticed that his spleen had once again become swollen. Worse, new blood tests revealed elevated levels of abnormal cells. The Shah’s medication was not working—but why? Flandrin deduced that the Shah’s second valet had accidentally refilled the bottles with the wrong pills. This was an easy enough thing to do. To avoid discovery, the doctors had agreed to substitute chlorambucil for Quinercyl, another medication whose white pills resembled the original anticancer drug. In their medical reports they substituted the word “Quinercyl” for “chlorambucil” and also placed the real medication in bottles labeled Quinercyl. One day, as a precautionary measure, and in advance of a state visit abroad, the valet decided to stock up on an extra supply of Quinercyl, and these were the pills that he used to refill the Shah’s medicine bottles for the next two months.
The prescription mix-up had still not been discovered by the time the Pahlavis flew to Kish Island for the 1976 Nowruz holidays. Farah noticed that her husband’s lip was swollen but was reassured by General Ayadi that nothing was amiss. By June, however, the Shah complained to Alam of stomach pains, skin rashes, and a headache, and it wasn’t until the end of summer when proper medication was restored that his condition stabilized.
Try as he might, the Shah could not escape the reality of his terminal illness. More than ever, he thought about the succession. Two weeks before flying down to Kish he granted an extensive interview to Newsweek magazine and explained his plans for Crown Prince Reza’s education and his own desire to eventually step down. “Secondary school, then certainly a military training,” the Shah explained. “Even in the European royal families, where the monarchs are doing what they do, the Prince still has military training. But in this country, if the King is not the real commander in chief of the armed forces, anything can happen.… Also he must understand that the people of our country expect the King to be the father, the teacher, the leader, the confidante. These are the characteristics of our people and monarchy. That’s why it has lasted so long.” He was “not pressing at all” for his son to learn the ropes. “But every day I can feel that he’s more and more interested … maybe knowing a little less, but always terribly interested—in the dams, in atomic energy, in everything.”
The Shah answered in the affirmative when his interviewer asked if the Crown Prince “would play an active role earlier than he would normally.”
“Yes,” the Shah replied. “I intend to retire, really, in about twelve and a half years’ time—if I live until that time—and let him take over. Before then, he will be gradually introduced to all the problems. This is my normal position and if everything goes in a normal way, there is nothing to change that decision.”
Though his publicly expressed intention was to hand over the reins in 1988, the qualifier to the statement was significant: if I live until that time.
* * *
ON KISH ISLAND, Queen Farah struggled to contain her own anxieties about the future.
Several days earlier, on March 21, 1976, she had noticed the cool way the public had responded to the lavish fiftieth-anniversary celebrations to mark Reza Shah’s coronation. She compared the indifference of the crowds to “a sudden icy wind.” Farah startled the Shah and Alam when she said she wondered if the Iranian people had lost interest in the monarchy. The two men waved away her fears, blaming them on an overactive imagination. They decided it was she who was out of touch with public attitudes. “The internal situation is sound,” Alam assured her. The regime’s generous social programs kept the middle class, workers, and farmers onside, and the complaints of a few intellectuals were of no concern. “I saw the problems while His Majesty saw the achievements,” said Queen Farah. “In bed we would compare notes. I would report about what was going wrong in the regions I had just toured. His Majesty would try to dismiss my report as exaggerated or one-sided. At times he would tell me that such minor problems were des accidents de parcours or the heritage of the past, and that all would be well in a few years’ time. Sometimes, however, he would get impatient and edgy. ‘No more bad news!’ His Majesty would command. And I would, naturally, change the subject.”
In June 1976 Farah returned from a trip to the countryside to sound the alarm. This time, rather than write a letter to her husband or have a private chat over lunch, she decided to take her concerns public. Speaking to journalists, she warned that “the rate of migration from villages to towns is dangerous.” Tehran could no longer absorb the newcomers, and she feared a social explosion if they did not receive adequate housing and jobs. “What had happened was when land reform was done, of course the agriculturalists were very happy, but there were people on the lands who were just the workers,” she later explained. “They suddenly didn’t have anywhere else to go and that created some social problems. We tried to see what we could do to help them. I remember that the government gave money for instance to those whose villages had been destroyed when a dam was built. But you know, they did not know how to properly use the money, they spent it, and then they were left with nothing. In the villages, except for agriculture they made handicrafts but they wouldn’t make enough money [to survive]. They would come to town, to Tehran, hoping to find work and a better salary.” Farah supported initiatives to tackle the problem of rural migration by promoting village handicrafts and small businesses. At her urging, wealthy businessmen agreed to open showrooms to display village wares. Still, the scale of the problems dwarfed the solutions.
During the oil boom the Shah approved the creation of an American-style think tank, the Group for the Study of Iranian Problems, which he hoped would provide the government with fresh ideas on how to manage policy challenges arising from the oil boom. Scores of scholars, industrialists, and lawyers joined the new association under the aegis of Hushang Nahavandi, head of his wife’s Special Bureau, who took charge as its chief executive. The group served to reassure Tehran’s liberal community that the Shah understood their concerns and took them seriously. Nahavandi’s leadership and the Queen’s patronage, however informal, gave the assembly the imprimatur of legitimacy. The Shah was also aware that Nahavandi had ambitions for the premiership, though he never regarded him as suitable for the task. In classic divide-and-rule fashion, Nahavandi’s appointment as head of the think tank became a device to keep Hoveyda from becoming too comfortable in his job. The prime minister retaliated by encouraging the secret police to harass Nahavandi and obstruct his work.
The group’s report on public attitudes came as a rude shock at court. Although living standards had improved considerably, the interviewees spoke more about their frustration and disillusion with modernization. The authors of the report were especially critical of the security forces, which they blamed for alienating young Iranians and the middle class from the monarchy. Rounding up and detaining students for weeks at a time created a lawless atmosphere that angered their families and friends, who pointed the finger of blame up the hill, at Niavaran. They warned that Savak’s harsh tactics were driving even moderates into the arms of the opposition. Unless steps were taken to reform the political system and address underlying grievances, there would be trouble. The middle class had to be engaged and a measure of democracy injected into Iranian political life. The Shah was deeply upset with the report’s conclusions. He rejected the implication that the regime was off-track or that he was out of touch with public sentiment. But his decision to hand the report off to Hoveyda for action suggested it had made an impression. Hoveyda, however, had no intention of lending credence to anything Nahavandi did, nor was he about to boost his rival’s credibility. The report was quietly shelved, its recommendations never debated. Had the prime minister bothered to read it, the Queen lamented, its findings “would have alerted the government to the dissatisfaction.”
More than ever, the Queen worried about the corrosive effects of corruption. Her sharp eye led to the exposure of one of the last great scandals of the Pahlavi era, an episode that some saw as an Iranian version of the doomed French Bourbon Dynasty’s celebrated “affair of the diamonds.” At the center of the scandal was an exquisite set of jewels that included a necklace, earrings, and a bracelet valued at $1 million. Farah had admired the collection and made discreet inquiries to the jeweler. “I am very sorry,” the jeweler told her representative, “the set was brought yesterday by the wife of Admiral Atai.” Admiral Atai, commander of the Imperial Navy, lived on a modest salary and could not possibly afford such extravagance. Farah told her husband, who ordered an immediate investigation. By the time the probe was finished the admiral was under arrest, and graft had been uncovered at the highest levels of the armed forces.
Corruption in the senior ranks of the armed forces was a dangerous development for a royal dynasty whose survival rested on the competence and integrity of the military. An official investigation revealed a culture of corruption with vast fortunes that had been acquired by Iranian officials who demanded kickbacks from foreign defense companies anxious to secure lucrative contracts to furnish Iran with their weapons systems. The Shah was also dealing with a scandal closer to home, this one involving the family of his sister. Princess Fatemeh, only daughter of Reza Shah and Esmat ol-Moluk Dowlatshahi, had first married an American, Vincent Hillyer, a union her brother had opposed to the point of stripping his sister of her royal prerogatives. Following their divorce in 1959 the Princess had returned to Iran, resumed her titles and responsibilities, and married General Mohammad Khatami, chief of the air force, and one of only two attendants who had accompanied the Shah and Queen Soraya on their desperate flight out of the country in August 1953. Khatami was a strong personality and talented leader, who enjoyed the Shah’s complete confidence, and who was also widely rumored to be the U.S. embassy’s preferred successor in the event the Shah was assassinated or removed in a coup. But in the last few years of his life Khatami had piled up a fortune estimated at more than $100 million, and at the time of his death in a hang-gliding accident in 1975 investigators in Washington were exposing his complicity in a brazen kickback scheme involving the sale of American Grumman fighter jets to the Imperial Iranian Air Force.
This, then, was the unhappy state of affairs that confronted the Shah in early 1976 and that convinced him of the need to take action. He set up a committee of experts “to recommend changes that would improve Iran’s image and loosen controls without affecting anything basic.” Committee members included senior ministers, security chiefs, and newspaper editors. The report they produced became the basis for the Shah’s subsequent policy shift, which was dubbed “liberalization.” They urged him to open a dialogue with Amnesty International and other international groups critical of Iran’s record on human rights. They recommended lifting the ban on twelve hundred books and easing censorship of newspapers and magazines. “There was a realization,” said one participant, “that Iran cannot develop technologically without a more open political environment.” A case in point was Aryamehr University, supposed to be the MIT of Iran, where classes were seriously disrupted by student protests. At the same time, “an effort was being made to pump some life into the flaccid body of Rastakhiz” when the Shah allowed Nahavandi’s Group for the Study of Iranian Problems to become a quasi third wing of Rastakhiz. He hoped this would stimulate the political establishment and encourage the exchange of ideas and a degree of informed debate. Yet he remained adamantly opposed to working with the National Front and the Liberation Movement of Iran, the two leftist groups that had tormented him in the 1950s and early ’60s. He hoped that Nahavandi’s liberal think tank would supplant them as a moderate centrist force that could reinvigorate Iran’s moribund political system.
* * *
SENSING A SUBTLE shift in atmosphere, Tehran-based diplomats began quietly comparing notes. Though the Shah projected an air of confidence and power, Iran’s economic and political malaise coincided with almost daily confrontations between the security forces and Mujahedin guerrilla fighters, who melted away into the warrens and slums of the southern suburbs. In 1976 almost one hundred people, including police, terrorists, and innocent civilians, were killed in shoot-outs that sometimes spilled over into the downtown commercial district. Iranian society was coming to a boil. In 1976 U.S. senator Charles Percy visited Tehran and asked Israel’s ambassador, Uri Lubrani, for his assessment. “Everything is okay with the Shah, except he has a big problem with the clerics,” said Lubrani. “He can’t control them in the way he can control the politicians and the others.”
Every few weeks American diplomat John Stempel, deputy political counselor at the U.S. embassy, held regular meetings with Guennady Kazankin, the second secretary at the Soviet embassy, at restaurants and coffee bars around Tehran. On April 14, 1976, the pair met in a booth at the Pizza Roma restaurant. The Russian asked Stempel “whether we had any recent difficulties with terrorists.” Stempel answered that “things had been mercifully quiet for the past couple of months, but that we remain concerned.” He asked Kazankin if he agreed with the Shah’s assertion that Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arming, training, and sheltering the Mujahedin in camps in Lebanon: “[Kazankin] said he thought this was not true, although perhaps a few Iranians were being trained in ‘centers abroad.’”
Two weeks later, on April 28, Stempel and Kazankin met again, this time for lunch at the Tehran Steak House, a popular watering hole for the sixty Russian families stationed in Tehran, and then on to Tiffany’s Restaurant for coffee. Kazankin wanted to hear Stempel’s view “about the future of U.S.-Iran relations and gradually pushed the discussion toward what happens in Iran when the Shah goes.”
The American admitted “there was a great deal of uncertainty as to what would happen when the Shah eventually left the scene.”
“No, no,” Kazankin pressed him. “I mean if he were to be taken away by accident, what do you think?”
If there were no suspicions of foul play, said Stempel, “the Regency Council and the Empress would take over. The US would support the legitimate succession to the Throne.”
At this point Kazankin broke in: “But aren’t you already preparing yourselves for the next step after that?”
“Of course not,” replied Stempel. In response to Kazankin’s next question on whether the State Department thought Farah “was strong enough to take control,” the American admitted that Farah appeared “quite capable and was obviously appearing more in public but that of course her eventual role would depend upon circumstances. In fact, the whole problem of political succession in Iran was much more uncertain than most countries.”
Stempel then asked Kazankin what Moscow thought of Iran’s future. The Soviet Union, answered Kazankin, “favors the people’s determining their own form of government.”
“With a little Cuban help?”
“No,” he added, “we have confidence that the will of the people will determine what happens.”