Something is in the air.
—THE SHAH
I wonder when we’re going to have a revolution in Iran.
—AMBASSADOR WILLIAM SULLIVAN
In the spring of 1977 Iran’s economy was destabilized by a sudden shortfall in government revenues caused by Saudi Arabia’s decision to flood crude markets with cheap oil. The Saudi move, undertaken with U.S. encouragement, prevented the Shah from raising prices yet again to finance Iran’s development projects and military buildup. The Americans had finally lost patience with their Iranian ally, whose aggressive oil policies threatened not only Iran’s economy but also the economies of Western allies in Europe and Asia. The U.S.-Saudi gambit worked and oil prices stayed in line. For the Iranian economy, however, the loss of billions of dollars in anticipated income from oil revenues precipitated a grave financial crisis. In the first nine days of the new year, Iran’s oil production fell 38 percent over the previous month, or two million barrels a day. “We’re broke,” the Shah glumly conceded. “Everything seems doomed to grind to a standstill, and meanwhile many of the programs we had planned must be postponed.”
Prime Minister Hoveyda abandoned his government’s budget forecasts, imposed a spending freeze, and sought a bridge loan from a consortium of American and European banks. Credit dried up and many large industrial and defense construction projects were postponed or canceled. The shortfall in oil revenues, combined with a drought in the south, led to a 50 percent drop in industrial production, and in the summer the national electricity grid failed, causing widespread power outages. “Government officials must walk up seven and eight stories to their offices,” reported the New York Times. “Tourists get caught in elevators. Office workers swelter in 100-degree-plus temperatures without air conditioning. Housewives complain that electrical appliances are damaged by the abrupt cuts and restorations of power.” The southern suburbs, which lacked even a basic sewage system, bore the brunt of power cuts lasting up to ten hours. Court Minister Asadollah Alam begged the Shah to replace his prime minister, warning that “we are now in dire financial peril and must tighten our belts if we are to survive.”
Government efforts to bring spending under control only made matters worse when the construction sector ground to a halt and tens of thousands of young male laborers lost their jobs and ended up on the streets. “People were flocking to town from the countryside, from the small villages all over the country, hoping to get in on the gravy train and crammed into impossible living quarters in south Tehran, by and large,” recalled William Lehfeldt who headed up the local branch of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and represented General Electric’s business interests in Iran. “And all looking for jobs. You could go down there with your truck and fill it with with people to go out working on day labor, and you didn’t have to pay them very much, because they were really paid starvation wages.… There was more disguised under- and unemployment than you could shake a stick at.” The government’s official unemployment statistics were “ludicrous. I realize they had to manufacture things, but if you went down into south Tehran in 1977 on a warm summer’s day, you wondered why the place didn’t blow up sooner.”
The economic contraction coincided with the Shah’s plan to liberalize Iranian society and “let off steam” by tolerating more dissent and relaxing censorship. But with the economy in free fall, Parviz Sabeti presented the Shah with an analysis that recommended a temporary halt to liberalization. He pointed out that similar measures in the early sixties had quickly spiraled out of control and culminated in Khomeini’s attempt to overthrow the monarchy. Since then, Iran’s population had grown to 35 million and “we have more students and workers than ever before, and many farmers migrating to the cities who are vulnerable. Today we also have what we did not have then—terrorist groups. It will be more difficult than in 1963 to maintain order.” If street demonstrations erupted while the Shah was trying to introduce liberal reforms he would be faced with the painful choice of ordering another crackdown and risking bloodshed, or offering more concessions to avoid a bloodbath. Sabeti considered it vital that the authorities demonstrate strength from day one “to show we are not intimidated, and we will not cave in to pressure.” The Shah read Sabeti’s report but rejected its conclusions. He had half a million men under arms, and the army was rock solid in its support. Iran’s economy and society had been thoroughly restructured in the past fourteen years. Despite bad news on the economy, he retained full confidence that the great silent majority of the Iranian people were with him. “Sabeti sees everything as black,” the Shah told General Nasiri, who handed him the report. “Negative. He doesn’t see anything positive. We have been careful. We have grown the military. He has not mentioned any of the positives. We are going to be okay.” The Shah was apt to remind pessimists such as Sabeti that the farr had always seen him through. He never forgot the dark days of 1953, when the people came into the streets to save the country from communism. Whatever hardships they faced, he never believed his children would turn against him.
If anything, the Shah believed that more reforms and concessions were needed to satisfy the mood of unrest. Though he took a dim view of Western-style democracy, which he associated with the turmoil of the war years and early fifties and sixties, he grudgingly accepted that a return to the 1906 Constitution was inevitable and that the window of opportunity that had allowed him to reshape Iranian society on his terms was closing: his health was failing, the economy was stalled, and the ambitious experiment with one-party rule had failed to broaden support for his regime. If the monarchy was to survive, it would have to identify with the aspirations of the emerging middle class, which demanded an end to authoritarianism and a return to constitutional rule. The Shah had made abrupt course corrections before. The problem this time was that no one, not his most devoted supporters, and certainly not his foes, could imagine that the king who relished power as much as he did would ever voluntarily relinquish it.
The Shah first intimated his game plan to his sister. In March 1977 Princess Ashraf visited Niavaran to pass on the concerns of her network of admirers and contacts. They were warning her that political and religious extremists were using liberalization as a cover to organize, agitate, and mobilize. She pointed out that the recent election of Jimmy Carter to the American presidency was another complicating factor. During his election campaign Carter had criticized Iran’s human rights record and called for restrictions to be placed on U.S. arms sales. Carter’s rhetoric, said the Princess, “feeds and encourages the opposition … it tells them that you do not have the support of an ally.”
The Shah did not disagree with her assessment, though she was taken aback with his proposed remedy. “All the more reason to speed up our reforms,” he explained. “We have established the basis for economic democracy. Now, if I have the time, I want to see political democracy. I’m thinking of a first for Iran … free elections in the summer of 1979, with the participation of all parties, except perhaps the [Communist] Tudeh. I’ve discussed this with my aides.” The Princess was astonished to hear her brother talk this way. Free elections two years from now? And what did he mean when he said “if I have the time”?
In Washington, Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi, who knew nothing of the Shah’s plan to democratize Iran, was also hearing from his constituents and friends. Like Ashraf, he passed on their concerns to the monarch. “People were telling me things were bad,” he remembered. “They were giving me a very gloomy situation. I wrote a letter to the Shah.”
* * *
BY HIS OWN estimate, fifty-five-year-old William Sullivan was a reluctant American envoy to the Pahlavi Court. Tall, brusque, and imposing, with a shock of white hair that suited his proconsul pretensions, after serving in the early seventies as an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, Sullivan was sent to Laos to oversee the Nixon administration’s secret air war against Communist insurgents. From Vientiane he was ordered to Manila to manage Washington’s fraught relations with the mercurial president Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Famously acerbic, Sullivan once had a memorable run-in with First Lady Imelda Marcos. When she mentioned that she did not know what more she could do to help the poor, Sullivan tartly advised her to “try feeding them cake.” He had no time for fools and invariably regarded himself as the smartest man in any room he entered. Sullivan expected his sunset diplomatic post to be in Mexico City, near where he planned to retire to the resort town of Cuernavaca. The incoming president and his national security team had other plans. Sullivan was dismayed to learn that the State Department was sending him to Tehran instead. “The nearest I had been to Tehran was in Calcutta nearly thirty years before,” he recalled. “I had never lived in the Islamic world and knew little about its culture or ethos. While I recognized the importance of Iran, the proposal did not make me jump for joy.” He knew he was out of his depth. “I make no pretense of understanding these people,” he once said of the Iranians. “I find the Iranians a lot more inscrutable than Asians.” He appeared not to know that Iran was in Asia.
Following Jimmy Carter’s election victory in November 1976, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had contacted William Sullivan to inform him that the incoming Democratic administration wanted to reset relations with Tehran. The White House believed that Carter’s two Republican predecessors, Nixon and Ford, had surrendered America’s strategic leverage over Tehran. Arms sales to Iran had spiraled out of control, with Iran’s armed forces struggling to absorb billions of dollars’ worth of systems they lacked the expertise to operate and maintain. U.S. military personnel were caught taking bribes and fixing defense contracts. Oil prices were a major point of contention in U.S.-Iran relations and so, too, was the Shah’s insistence on enriching uranium on Iranian soil. U.S. officials suspected their ally of harboring ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons using American and European technology.
Carter’s emphasis on human rights as a core principle of U.S. foreign policy was another sticking point in relations. The downfall of President Nixon in the Watergate scandal had revealed widespread abuses by the CIA at home and abroad. American public opinion was shocked at revelations that their government plotted coups and assassinations and supported unelected leaders in the developing world. In 1976 Amnesty International published a report that claimed the Shah ran one of the world’s most repressive regimes. The group repeated claims made by Iranian opposition groups that between twenty-five thousand and a hundred thousand people were in jail on trumped-up political charges. The International Commission of Jurists piled on when it described human rights violations in the kingdom as “unprecedented,” a statement that implied conditions inside Iran were worse than in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea and Idi Amin’s Uganda. Simultaneously, Iranian poet Reza Baraheni’s best-selling prison memoir Crowned Cannibals described his country as a charnel house of misery and murder. “Thousands of men and women have been summarily executed during the last twenty-three years,” he wrote in gripping prose. “More than 300,000 people are estimated to have been in and out of prison during the last nineteen years of the existence of Savak; an average of 1,500 people are arrested every month.… There have been occasions when 5,000 people have been kidnapped in one day. This puts the number of kidnappers in the thousands. Sometimes even tanks are used in order to get a suspect out of his lodgings.” Amid a wave of moral indignation, Time magazine lamented Washington’s inability to influence domestic policy in “largely self-sufficient and comparatively wealthy” states like Iran: “One widespread hope is that torturing dictatorships will be overthrown.”
For years the Shah, Prime Minister Hoveyda, and government officials had looked the other way, dismissing antigovernment protesters as “a bunch of Clockwork Orangers,” and allowing the security forces to get on with the job of defeating the urban guerrillas who carried out bombings and assassinations. “There has been enough of this preaching, moralizing, and telling others that they are trash or that they are third or fourth rate,” the Shah erupted in an audience with a U.S. diplomat. “It won’t work, you will see. Don’t be encouraged even if 200 dissidents write letters to you. It doesn’t mean anything.” The U.S. embassy cabled Washington that the Shah “has been stung by rash of unfavorable publicity appearing in US and western media about human rights conditions in Iran. Basically, he considers it unfair, unwarranted, and lacking in recognition of major socioeconomic advances his country has achieved during his reign.” Was it a coincidence, he demanded to know, that Saudi Arabia, America’s chief ally within OPEC, received a free pass on human rights? Iranians enjoyed far greater freedoms and a higher standard of living than the Saudis. “If you Americans are going to be so moral, you must apply a single standard to the whole world,” he lectured Newsweek in an interview in early 1977. “If I have a few thousand Communist people in prison so that others can live in a free society, it is magnified and talked about endlessly. But do you ever talk about the hundreds of thousands who were murdered in Cambodia?… I cannot believe that the US would be so shortsighted as to cut off arms sales to my country.”
The Shah was genuinely mystified by the lurid reports that appeared in the American and European press of mass arrests, cases of torture, and executions. His weekly meetings with General Nasiri had always focused on broader questions of intelligence, not what he described as “petty” matters such as prison conditions or interrogations. He might have followed the example of most every other Middle East leader and either ignored the critics and rebuffed the Americans or introduced superficial reforms that could later be withdrawn. But he knew that the Iranian middle class, whom he regarded as his most important supporters, wanted to see an improvement in the political atmosphere. The Shah was paying the price of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on prisoner detention adopted five years earlier by the regime’s Anti-Terrorist Joint Committee. Worried that General Nasiri had not been straight with him, he took the unprecedented step of inviting the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate Iranian political prisons. He ordered his own parallel internal inquiry to make sure the Red Cross inspectors received full cooperation. In addition to meeting Red Cross envoys, the Shah met with Martin Ennals, head of Amnesty International, and also with William Butler, president of the International Commission of Jurists, and listened to their complaints. Parviz Sabeti gave a rare interview to the Washington Post correspondent in Tehran and dismissed Amnesty International’s report as “pure fabrication and not at all true. In all Iran there are only 3,200 political prisoners. We don’t have enough jails to house 100,000 prisoners.” The Shah had already banned the use of torture during interrogations and anybody caught “will get six years in prison.” The number of “active terrorists at large in Iran may not exceed 100.” Before 1970, he admitted, “Iran had not felt it necessary to execute people for anti-state activities.” However, following the outbreak of guerrilla warfare in 1971 the “new wave of terrorism had ‘caused us to get a bit rougher.’” Sabeti’s counterclaims raised the question: Who was telling the truth?
The Red Cross inspectors reported their findings in June 1977. They counted 3,087 political prisoners, down from a peak of 3,700 inmates two years earlier. Approximately one third of the inmates, or 900, reported having been subjected to some form of torture or abuse while in detention. The inspectors found no evidence of torture “over the past few months.” The striking discrepancy between the Red Cross and Amnesty International investigations was explained by the fact that Amnesty relied solely on statistics provided by opposition groups and foreign press reports. Western journalists like Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post had also been manipulated by Abolhassan Banisadr and anti-Shah propagandists in Paris and Beirut. The truth was that from 1971-1978 at most 386 and as few as 312 Iranian dissidents were killed by the security forces or died in detention.
The findings of the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that hundreds of Iranians had been tortured by the security forces but exonerated the regime of the worst charges leveled by Reza Baraheni and others. Yet his Iranian critics and their Western sympathizers simply ignored the report or accused the Shah of a cover-up. The same American and European newspapers that had fulminated against the Shah lost interest in the story and never made the necessary corrections. This was a shame. In an internal intelligence memorandum published in November 1977, Jimmy Carter’s State Department reported that the Shah’s intervention had been decisive and that there had been not a single case of torture in Iran in the past twelve months. “During the past year the Shah has moved further and more rapidly on human rights than most leaders with a similar image. Because he does not wish to be labeled as a US puppet, he particularly resents inferences that his efforts are in response to US pressure, but the fact remains that they only began after Iran received considerable bad publicity in the US and candidate Carter looked like a winner in the US elections.” The Shah had followed through with reforms to the judicial system and released almost half of all political prisoners. He had even gone so far as to instruct his security forces to “assist needy families of ‘anti-security’ prisoners.” Indeed, the Red Cross inspection team had “praised the ‘indispensable’ interest and backing of the Shah” for its work. In a separate report, the CIA concurred with State’s assessment.
The human rights situation in Iran has been improving. Only government opponents advocating violent overthrow of the regime or who are suspected of terrorist activity are now being arrested, greatly reducing the number of persons being detained on security grounds.
Savak’s influence and importance had always been overstated. At its peak, the security agency employed no more than five thousand office workers and agents in the field—a far cry from the twenty thousand claimed by critics. Ten thousand additional names—not the millions alleged by Baraheni—were listed on the books as either full-time or part-time informants, though even the latter figure was inflated because it included individuals who had been approached by the secret police and refused requests to cooperate. The Shah’s “eyes and ears” had the technical ability to monitor just fifty conversations at a time. “People worried about Savak,” recalled British journalist Martin Woollacott, the Guardian correspondent who was married to an Iranian. The reporter later admitted that he had investigated and largely dismissed claims made by opposition groups of mass torture and brutality. “We were dubious. Savak worked very well in instilling passivity, some fear, and a large degree of acquiescence with a minimum of violence. But the picture of Savak as bloodthirsty did not stand up to scrutiny.”
By now Parviz Sabeti, who had succeeded General Moghadam as head of Savak’s Third Directorate, worried that the Shah’s decision to “hand over the prisons to the Red Cross” had led to a loss of control. His men were confused and demoralized—why were terrorists trying to overthrow the regime and credited with killing high officials now getting a free pass? “He got advice to allow prison inspections and put them under [Red Cross] control,” said Sabeti. “And this sent the signal [to opposition groups] that the Shah was not in charge. That he was finished.”
Queen Farah favored placing restraints on Savak and was an enthusiastic proponent of liberalization. Like her husband, she thought Sabeti was too much of a pessimist. “You warned us and nothing happened,” she said after the Red Cross inspectors left Iran.
“It will,” Sabeti answered back. “You wait. Evin Prison has become like a hotel.”
Sabeti’s view found support from an unexpected quarter. Mohammad Ali Gerami, a close associate of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, had been locked up in Evin for the past several years. He recalled the dark days before prison inspections. “No one dared talk among the prisoners,” he said. “Even if we went to prison we did not look each other in the eyes for fear of violent reprisals.” Everything changed when the Red Cross arrived. “In Evin, the facilities improved. We were allowed the Quran.”
Gerami and other revolutionaries sensed that change was coming to Iran, that there had been a subtle shift in mood. They decided that the Shah was acting on the defensive, most likely under pressure from his American allies. They watched and waited, ready to make their move.
* * *
AFTER A LENGTHY interregnum, William Sullivan finally presented his credentials to the Shah on June 18, 1977. His instructions from Washington were to restore order to arms sales, resolve the nuclear standoff, press for relief on oil prices, and encourage liberalization. Sullivan was intrigued to discover that Iran’s King was anything but the ruthless dictator he had read about. He recalled the time they both attended a joint Iranian-American air force exercise in the desert south of the capital. The Shah arrived separately, piloting his own transport plane. After landing, he ignored his officials, walked straight over to Sullivan, and asked the ambassador to accompany him for the van ride across the desert. While the crowds assembled in the reviewing stand the two men kept cool in an air-conditioned trailer. “Once inside, he unhitched his tunic, relaxed, and talked in his usual easy, gracious way about a number of things,” said Sullivan. When the time came to leave, however, the Shah let out a sigh, straightened his military tunic, and prepared to make his public entrance.
From the gracious, easy, smiling host with whom I had been talking, he transformed himself suddenly into a steely, ramrod-straight autocrat. This involved not only adjusting his uniform and donning dark glasses but also throwing out his chest, raising his chin, and fixing his lips in a grim line. When he had achieved this change to his satisfaction, he thrust open the door of the trailer and stalked out across the few remaining steps to the reviewing stand.
Sullivan might have shown the Shah more respect if he really had been a Suharto, Pinochet, or Marcos. But his host’s shyness, soft-spoken demeanor, and European sensibilities seemed only to invite contempt. Sullivan decided the Shah was a slightly ridiculous marionette who liked to play dress-up. He gave his host virtually no credit for lasting thirty-six years on the Peacock Throne—the fifth-longest reign in the history of the Iranian monarchy—let alone his life-and-death struggle to reform a conservative Muslim society averse to change. He showed little if any sensitivity to the unique pressures the Shah faced at home by supporting U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, selling oil to Israel, and guarding the approaches to the Persian Gulf from an array of adversaries. Sullivan received a polite welcome at the palace. The Shah’s entourage were less receptive, viewing the new ambassador as they would a spider climbing up the drainpipe. His reputation for asserting himself and involving himself in his host countries’ internal affairs was already well known. “Everyone buckled up when Sullivan arrived,” remembered Maryam Ansary, wife of the Shah’s finance and economy minister. “He came in with his reputation and the devil on his back.” When she heard that Bill Sullivan was on his way to Tehran, Imelda Marcos placed a phone call to Queen Farah and passed on a stark warning: “Be careful. Sullivan is trouble. Wherever he goes he makes trouble.”
The ambassador’s jaunty irreverence dismayed and offended his hosts. It was customary for new envoys to visit the offices of the major daily newspapers. Farhad Massoudi, publisher of the evening paper Ettelaat, arranged for Sullivan to be shown around his newsroom and meet with his editors. “I was quite surprised on a number of occasions in the way he spoke about the Shah,” said Massoudi. “He did not give the necessary respect that I had been expecting from a new American ambassador.” Sullivan’s tone and attitude only encouraged the rampant speculation that he had been sent to Tehran to sow mischief. Sullivan was still settling in when he attended a dinner party hosted by Britain’s ambassador Tony Parsons. “I wonder when we’re going to have a revolution in Iran,” Sullivan cheerfully mused to his female dinner companion. “Every country I go to, after a while there is a revolution.” Unfortunately for the ambassador, the lady in question was the wife of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Queen Farah’s adviser on cultural and religious matters and a regular visitor to the palace.
* * *
IN THE SUMMER of 1977 a tall, austere, twenty-six-year-old seminarian named Ali Hossein divided his time between Qom, where he studied religion, and Tehran, where he was enrolled in Western philosophy classes at the University of Tehran. He spent Sundays through Wednesdays in the capital and on Thursday mornings drove down to Qom, ostensibly to receive instruction in religion for two days in the hawza. But his studies were a ruse—the young clergyman was a courier for the revolutionary underground whose job was to convey secret messages and materials back and forth between safe houses in both cities. After leaving the bus depot in Qom he made straight for the home of Ayatollah Rasti Kashani, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal representative in the holy city. Two days later, Hossein was on his way back to Tehran, holding a satchel that contained tape cassettes of his hero’s latest revolutionary pronouncements. The tapes, which had been flown in from Paris, West Berlin, and Beirut, were distributed to Hossein’s family members and friends, who in turn took them to the bazaars, where they were sold. Others passed them hand to hand. Hossein was not afraid of being caught by the security forces. “There was no fear in the followers of Imam Khomeini,” he recalled. “If they arrested me and killed me I became a martyr and martyrdom was a very great blessing. We welcomed martyrdom. We were thirsty for martyrdom. We knew that in this situation we could not fight the power. We could show by martyrdom that Western slogans about human rights and democracy were big lies.”
Hossein’s personal journey from pious student to revolutionary zealot mirrored the experiences of a generation of young, educated Iranians who rejected the Shah’s vision of a secular state and dedicated their lives to establishing an Islamic republic. “Before the revolution I liked to study Western culture,” he said. At the age of twenty-three he had sold a parcel of land to pay for a trip to Europe. But instead of returning home feeling inspired and uplifted, Hossein found that his encounter with modernity left him deeply disillusioned. “When I traveled in Western countries I used to ask people the same question: ‘What is the acceptable philosophy for the creation of the human being?’ Each time the answer was the same: ‘comfort and pleasure.’ They claimed to believe in individualism. They believed in multiculturalism. In nationalism. In rationalism.” Western societies, he decided, were “animalistic and not human.” Appalled by their loose morals, their individualism, and their obsession with material goods, Hossein returned to Iran with a sharper awareness of what the White Revolution meant for Islam. “After that trip I became ready to tolerate every type of torture in prison and made a firm determination to fight with [the Pahlavi] regime. I found that Iranian governments wanted to make Iran in [the Western] image.”
An opportunity came up to work for the government, and Ali Hossein accepted an offer to accompany an official from the Ministry of Education to Shiraz. On the trip from Tehran his bus pulled over at the side of the road to pick up an American traveler. None of the Iranians on board wanted to sit beside the foreigner but the seminarian, who spoke English, told them, “I am ready to sit with this American.” Over the next twelve hours he and the traveler talked about many things. The American admitted he was overcompensated for the work he did and that Iran offered him a much higher standard of living than he could ever have back home. He was so pleased with his new status that he had decided to bring his daughter over from America to study at Pahlavi University in Shiraz. “The Americans could do whatever they wanted in Iran without observing the customs of the people,” concluded the Iranian. When he reached Shiraz his hosts at the Ministry of Education “showed me some Westernized youth and said, ‘We are going to establish an organization to change the culture of youth to make them look like this.’” This was the last straw: at the age of twenty-six he joined “the movement” and went underground.
Ali Hossein was the quintessential true believer. “Since we were active and new to the circle of Ayatollah Khomeini, we used to follow everything exactly.” He repeated verbatim Khomeini’s solemn pronouncements that the Shah’s plan to liberalize Iranian public life was “a plot by America to deceive the people and nothing more,” and that President Carter’s support for human rights was little more than a trick to prolong the enslavement of the Iranian people. The Shah “gave” women the right to vote, but who was he to “give” anyone anything? Who was he to decide such matters? If Iranian men were not free to vote as they wished, then “how does he claim he is giving women their freedom?” The real enemy was not the Shah (“the Shah was nothing”) but America. “[The Imam] was fighting the international power of the United States. The Shah was the first step. He had attacked the United States and Israel in 1963. They were the real targets. He felt a prophetic responsibility on his shoulders to save humanity.” The revolutionaries understood that the Shah’s decision to liberalize provided them with an opportunity to organize and mobilize. “We saw [liberalization] as weakness!” said Hossein. “Yes, of course!”
For more than a decade the Coalition of Islamic Societies had represented Khomeini’s interests inside Iran while he remained in exile. In the midseventies their revolutionary cells began to sense a shift in momentum. Opposition to the White Revolution was growing, and interest in Islam among younger Iranians led to a surge in seminary enrollments. In 1977 some 60,000 “undergraduates” studied at 300 religious schools around the country, while 180,000 mullahs were active in 80,000 mosques, holy shrines, schools, and other Islamic sites. In the aftermath of the June 1975 uprising in Qom, more seminarians and younger clergy concluded that the Pahlavi regime could not be peacefully reformed and that their entire way of life was at stake. They agreed with Khomeini on the need to reject the 1906 constitutional settlement, revolt against the regime, and replace the monarchy with an Islamic state. These converts studied and employed tactics used by other successful revolutionary movements throughout Africa, South America, and Asia. To escape Savak’s prying eyes, sympathetic teachers in the hawza devised “hidden classes” that never appeared in the official academic curriculum. “In my hidden classes we learned revolutionary activism, which we could not learn in an official course,” said Ali Hossein. “We participated in classes on the characteristics of Islamic government. First, they used to teach us the necessity of revolution, Islamic government, corruption and the oppression of the Shah and his superpower supporters. We studied how to make the people ready to participate in demonstrations and make them aware.”
The young revolutionaries scrutinized the Pahlavi regime’s strengths and weaknesses but also those of his more mainstream opponents. Just as leftists such as Abolhassan Banisadr accepted that they could not overthrow the monarchy without the help of the ulama, Khomeini’s supporters accepted that they would have to adopt a moderate posture and work closely alongside liberal and leftist opposition groups that enjoyed the support of the middle class. Both sides agreed that if the middle class deserted the Shah, his regime would collapse. The two main opposition groups favored by middle-class liberals and leftists were the National Front, the party of former prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, and the Liberation Movement of Iran, the spin-off from the National Front led by moderate Islamist Mehdi Bazargan. Khomeini’s agents studied these men and their beliefs like insects under a microscope. “We knew that these groups did not believe in Khomeini,” said Ali Hossein. “But the requirements of revolution sometimes make use of people who are not in complete agreement with the leaders. We were aware of Bazargan’s objections to Khomeini even before the revolution began. He did not believe in revolutionary activities and we knew what he and his people said in private.” The Khomeini movement had already infiltrated Bazargan’s circle and spied on him: “There were people who were with Khomeini who pretended to be close to Bazargan.” In their “hidden classes,” the religious students read and critiqued works by Bazargan and Banisadr. “We did not believe in them even then. The Imam recognized that [these] Westernized people could not run Iran for Muslims. Their preoccupation was with the West and not Islam.”
The dangerous game began. Banisadr and Bazargan believed they were the ones who would inherit power by manipulating Khomeini. Khomeini had the same idea, but in reverse. His plan was always to outmaneuver liberals and the left, and the “democracy” he envisioned was purely Islamic in form and content. “Khomeini did not believe in parties or in parliamentary struggles, even though he recognized a parliament was essential,” said Ali Hossein. The challenge was to cultivate the support of Iran’s urbane middle class, which in turn would earn him sympathy from the Western powers and international public opinion. Then once the Shah was deposed Khomeini’s men planned to follow the example the Bolsheviks had set in Russia when in 1917 they seized total power for themselves.
Perhaps more than even he knew, Khomeini had already won the hearts and minds of the children of the Pahlavi elite and many in the middle and upper-middle classes. They decided that poor religious students like Ali Hossein represented the true voice of a nation corrupted by sterile Western materialism. Karim Pakravan, the son of General Pakravan, told an American visitor to Iran that in his youth he too had once supported Mossadeq. “The young had absolutely no interest in religion,” he said. “Khomeini became important only after he was driven into exile by the Shah. The Shah’s father, Reza Shah, had been very successful in fighting the mullahs. He made a direct assault on the clergy—forcing women to take off veils, riding into the shrines and beating the mullahs. He had public sympathy, because then the clergy were corrupt and wealthy. They were hated by everybody. Now they have lost their lands and the religious foundations. The mullahs have been purified. They have the power of poverty.” Intellectuals like Pakravan believed that Khomeini and his followers were to be pitied and helped. “Khomeini is merely a symbol of opposition. He is a respected Muslim, but he has no power. Ten years ago, no prayers were said in universities. Religious students were mocked. Now there is a genuine student problem. Many of the students come from poor families in the provinces. They have to rent homes, and the financial burdens are unbearable.”
Young Iranians educated at the Sorbonne returned to Iran as committed Marxists willing to subjugate themselves to Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-Shah opposition. “[Marx] exposes the imperialists and their rape of all the countries of the Third World, including Iran,” parroted one student, a leftist who donned a chador not because she understood or believed in Islam but because she wanted to make a political statement against the Shah’s regime. Though Marx had condemned religion as the “opiate of the masses … in developing countries it is different. At times, religious feelings and social movements go hand in hand. That is the way it is now in Iran. We are all of us united against the Shah. We are in an Islamic country, and all social movements inevitably have a religious coloring. We do not believe there will ever be Communism here as there is Communism in Russia or China. We will have our own brand of socialism.” Remarks like hers pointed to a curious phenomenon last seen in Imperial Russia sixty years before: Iran’s best-educated minds helping their future executioners erect scaffolds in their name.
By the summer of 1977 the combination of a genuine Islamic revival and leftist and intellectual support for Khomeini had led to disorienting, alarming scenes on the streets of Iran’s cities. “More and more women are seen on the streets of this Middle Eastern capital wearing the chador, a long enveloping veil, in what looks like a women’s backlash,” reported the New York Times. Popular culture reflected the new mood of sobriety. After the Quran, the second-best-selling book in Iran that year was a fundamentalist tract called The Keys to Heaven. The Shah saw with his own eyes what was happening when on May 29, 1977, during a rare public outing to southern Tehran, he was disturbed to see “thousands of women wearing the veil.” Events in the region that spring and summer suggested that the revival of Islam was not limited to Iran or the Shia. In Egypt, President Sadat called out the army to crush street protests. The country’s former minister for religious affairs was murdered in July by zealots who carried out a wave of terror attacks against cinemas, nightclubs, and other symbols of Western culture. “We don’t want your civilization!” cried one of the Egyptian defendants on trial for the minister’s murder. “We want to live in the desert under the clear blue sky, where we can pray to God!” Extremists in Syria staged attacks against government officials and assassinated Russian military advisers. In Turkey, dozens were killed and injured when gunmen opened fire on workers celebrating May Day in Taksim Square in Istanbul. But nothing prepared the Shah for the overthrow of his ally Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan in that same month. The new Pakistani leader, General Zia ul-Haq, was a devout Muslim who announced his intention to adopt a new constitution based on Sharia. Through the Muslim world, leaders who had previously shown disdain or outright contempt for religion suddenly found the need to prove their credentials as men of faith. President Hafez al-Asad of Syria was photographed at Friday prayer services, and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, ostensibly a socialist, closed nightclubs, imposed Sharia law, and declared his support for an Islamic state.
Religious fervor was on display even at Niavaran, where a small cadre of the Shah’s own household staff emulated Grand Ayatollah Khomeini as their marja. “Afterwards, we found out that one of the young men who was working at Niavaran was in the [Khomeini] movement,” recalled Queen Farah. Her own entourage had been infiltrated. “And the funny thing was, my, one of my ladies, she traveled with me, and suddenly I realized she was wearing a scarf. I didn’t ask her why. And then with me she would put the scarf down, and when a man came she would put it up. We were hearing that in the universities some women were wearing veils and scarves, and the universities wanted to regulate them because they could catch fire in the science laboratories, or they could hide something during the exams.” It apparently never occurred to the King and Queen to purge their household of malcontents or screen employees for their beliefs, though the security implications were obvious: some of the same men and women who cooked and served the Imperial Family their meals, cleaned the floors, and stood guard duty already questioned their allegiance to the dynasty, struggling to reconcile service to the Pahlavis with their fervent devotion to the man they upheld as their marja.
By now the Shah’s relationship with his daughter had completely broken down. Princess Shahnaz and Khosrow Djahanbani were barred from the palace grounds, much to the relief of the Shah’s bodyguards, who, unbeknownst to him, were secretly operating under orders not to leave him alone in the same room with his son-in-law. If Djahanbani made any sudden movements toward the King they were instructed to shoot him dead on the spot. The Queen’s efforts to mediate came to naught, and the last time father and daughter met before the revolution was at a house party in Tehran. Informed that Shahnaz was on the property he at first refused to acknowledge her. Farah nudged him to make the first move but their last exchange was brief and awkward. The Shah’s anxieties were revealed in an interview to mark his fifty-eighth birthday. He reminded the women of Iran how far they had come—and how much they had to lose if they returned to “medieval” ways. “How could we write off half the population—that is to say all Iranian women?” he said. “If our women continue to hide behind veils we shall not achieve our national aims. How could such women score victory at the Olympics or, when and if the need arose, fight patriotic wars? If we want a progressive Iran we ought to accept its terms also. A person’s appearance has nothing to do with his or her moral standards, and refusing to work while hiding oneself away from society does not indicate purity or chastity either.” The Shah had lost one daughter to the siren call of Islam, and now he began to worry that if he did not take action the rest of his children might soon slip from his grasp.
Determined to inoculate the throne from charges of apostasy, the Shah decided to highlight his role as Custodian of the Faith and offer the clergy small, tactical concessions until the religious fever broke. As a fifty-eighth-birthday gift to the nation he announced his intention to build a new Islamic university in the city of Mashad. The Shah hoped that Mashad, a more moderate seat of Islamic learning, would displace Qom as Shiism’s most important center for religious scholarship. He assigned management of the project to Hossein Nasr, the Islamic scholar who advised his wife on cultural issues. The Shah also invited Nasr to enter politics when he offered him the post of secretary-general of the Rastakhiz Party. If he agreed to serve in that position for one year, the Shah said he hoped Nasr would consider taking the job of prime minister to lead Iran into free elections in the summer of 1979. Though Nasr preferred to stay out of politics and turned down the appointment, the Shah had revealed his thinking. As he surveyed the horizon in the summer of 1977 he recognized that storm clouds of a different, unwelcome sort were forming, and that interim measures were needed to batten down the hatches and clear the decks. If that meant Islamizing the Pahlavi monarchy in the short term, then so be it.
At the end of the summer Princess Ashraf returned to Niavaran to warn her brother for a second time that her contacts had told her that opposition groups were exploiting liberalization to organize and agitate. The annual ritual of Ramadan, one of the central pillars of the Muslim faith, was under way. During the monthlong observance—the date each year varied slightly according to the lunar calendar—the devout sought to purify their hearts, minds, and bodies through fasting. During Ramadan no food or beverages were consumed in daylight hours, though the rules were not as strict as they appeared: travelers, diabetics, and women pregnant, breastfeeding, or menstruating were exempted from fasting. Nonetheless, Ramadan was a time when individuals, families, and communities renewed their commitment to the Prophet and their faith in Islam. Long hours were spent in the mosques listening to prayer leaders deliver sermons and speeches. After dusk, at the end of fasting, families and their friends gathered for celebratory meals to socialize and exchange news. The combination of fasting, prayer, and celebration produced feelings of elevated spiritual unity. In the late summer of 1977, at the height of Ramadan, Tehran’s mosques took advantage of liberalization to host large political gatherings at which the Shah and his reforms were denounced as un-Islamic. “We have not been allowed to form political parties,” said a dissident lawyer. “We have no newspapers of our own. But the religious leaders have a built-in communications system. They easily reach the masses through their weekly sermons in the mosques and their network of mullahs throughout the nation. That is why so many nonreligious elements cloak their opposition in the mantle of religion.” Mosque orators spoke in code to avoid provoking a reaction from Savak but their meaning was understood by all. At the same time, everyone was talking about the marked drop-off in terrorist activity by the Mujahedin.
The Shah told Ashraf that he couldn’t quite put his finger on it but he too sensed an undercurrent of unrest. “Something is in the air,” he agreed. “What concerns me most is this renewal of the alliance between the Red and the Black.” He explained that Savak had recently uncovered evidence that the Mujahedin and Fedayeen had agreed to form a united front and share resources. His next remark suggested that he understood the implication: “It is clear they will settle for nothing less than the overthrow of our regime.” He resolved to stay on track. Nothing, he assured his sister, would deter him from democratizing Iran—there could be no going back.
* * *
QUEEN FARAH SPENT the first half of July 1977 on a speaking tour of the United States. She was puzzled to see young Iranian student protesters holding aloft portraits of an elderly clergyman whose face she did not recognize. “And so I asked the name of this mullah who was idolized by our young demonstrators and whose defiant look meant nothing to me,” she recalled. Mention of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s name brought back unpleasant memories of the summer of 1963, when his mobs had threatened to storm the palace. To see the old man hailed now as an icon, like some Iranian Che Guevara, made no sense to her.
Farah’s party was scheduled to fly on the Concorde to France on July 14 with a brief stopover before returning to Tehran the next day. After landing in Paris the Queen was handed a cryptic note from Dr. Abbas Safavian, someone she knew well from her work in academia. “I have to stay on an extra day,” she told her party and they left without her. The next morning Farah was in her suite when Safavian entered with her husband’s medical team. For the past few months Bernard, Flandrin, and Milliez had debated the ethics of staging a medical intervention. They worried that the Shah was not receiving the correct dosage of medication and that his health was already starting to deteriorate. Yet whenever they raised the topic of informing the Queen he would change the subject. By the summer of 1977 the physicians agreed that regardless of the patient’s wishes they were obliged to break confidence. It was Jean Bernard who broke the devastating news of her husband’s cancer. He explained that the Shah’s condition was “chronic but serious … he knew it and had not wanted to say anything about it. All this had to be understood, if not accepted in such a short time, and then kept to herself. More difficult still: how was [the Queen] going to tell her husband that she knew about it?”
For Farah, the shock of diagnosis was compounded by the knowledge of her husband’s years of deception. She couldn’t help but feel betrayed. There was a harrowing parallel too with her father’s cancer diagnosis thirty years earlier. As a child she had been lied to by her mother about her beloved father’s illness. Now, as mother, wife, and Queen, she had to cope with the bitter reality of history repeating itself. “I thought that was the end,” she remembered. “I cried all night long. I could not bear the thought of returning to Tehran and facing him. What would I tell him?” She flew back to Tehran on July 16, anguished but composed. She smiled through the arrival ceremony and concealed her distress from the battery of photographers and government officials on hand to greet her at the airport. The Shah, meanwhile, knew nothing about the medical intervention. All that he had agreed to do was allow Bernard and Flandrin to meet his wife when they were next in Tehran.
* * *
THE SUMMER OF 1977 was a heady time for Ali Hossein and his band of young revolutionaries. Their handlers made the crucial decision to start testing the reflexes of the security forces. They wanted to gauge the extent to which the Shah’s pledge to loosen controls and tolerate more dissent was purely symbolic or a genuine concession. Younger men in the movement were ready to put their training to good use and stage provocations. They hoped a bloody crackdown would discredit liberalization by exposing the Shah as a hypocrite in the eyes of the Iranian middle class and isolating him still farther from his allies. “We would move in groups, through alleyways,” said Hossein, “and we would meet in different homes.”
For the past year terrorist operations against the Pahlavi regime had halted in response to appeals from the leaders of the two best-known mainstream opposition groups. The secular National Front and the Islamist Liberation Movement of Iran urged the Mujahedin and Fedayeen to give President Carter time to show he was serious in pressuring the Shah to improve human rights and return to constitutional rule. U.S. intelligence experts described the Mujahedin as “fanatic religious conservatives” who opposed the Shah because his reforms threatened to weaken the power of religious leaders. They described themselves as “Islamic Marxists” because of their commitment to the Prophet but also to social justice and equality. Khomeini had forged a tactical alliance with the Mujahedin in 1972, boosting their fortunes when he declared it “the duty of all good Muslims to support [the group] and overthrow the Shah.”
Khomeini’s blessing legitimized the Mujahedin in the eyes of Shia fundamentalists. Mujahedin recruits trained in terrorist camps run by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and George Habash’s even more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. After completing training in Lebanon, Libya, and Syria they slipped back into Iran, some posing “as clergymen … [they] took code names, formed cells and provoked incidents of terrorism.” “The quantity and sophistication of weapons available to the terrorists is impressive,” concluded a secret U.S. intelligence assessment produced in September 1977. “Their arsenal includes assault rifles, armor-piercing rifle grenades and possibly mortars, which allows them considerable flexibility in their tactics.” Mujahedin guerrillas also enjoyed ready access to radios, handheld walkie-talkies, and “electronic devices such as oscilloscopes, transformers, condensers, relays and grated circuits.” Some of the Mujahedin’s funding came from followers of Khomeini who traveled to Najaf to make their financial donations in person. The Marja “siphoned off a portion and gave the rest to the [Mujahedin].” The group’s other lucrative source of income came from Colonel Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, who “provided financial assistance to both Khomeini and [the Mujahedin]. The Libyan embassy in Beirut allegedly forwarded $100,000 to the Mujahedin every 3 months.” The financing and training paid off; by 1977 Mujahedin operatives had infiltrated Ambassador Sullivan’s embassy and secured jobs working in the motor pool used by U.S. army advisers.
The second major terrorist group, the Fedayeen, were secular Communists, dedicated Maoists bitterly opposed to any form of organized religion. They did not target Americans in Iran and focused their attacks exclusively on Iranian buildings and military and government personnel. The Fedayeen underwent training in guerrilla warfare operations in terrorist camps in Oman, South Yemen, and at bases in Libya run by George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Fedayeen were well stocked with explosives, machine pistols, revolvers, submachine guns, high-powered hunting rifles, and Tungsten armor-piercing ammunition supplied by Communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Financing for group operations came predominantly from Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi, who kept the group on a retainer to the tune of $400,000 each year. Fedayeen leaders also enjoyed close ties to an assortment of international terrorist groups, including Swiss anarchists, West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Fedayeen agents earned notoriety by disguising themselves as Iranian student protesters and storming Iranian consulates in European capitals. Though they claimed the attacks were staged to draw attention to human rights abuses in Iran, their real motive in assaulting diplomatic missions was to seize as many Iranian passports as possible, which were then used to create fake identities for sleeper agents sent back into Iran.
Libya’s Gadhafi boosted Khomeini’s fortunes at a crucial moment. In 1977 Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari and the other moderate marjas and grand ayatollahs noticed a marked drop-off in the religious taxes they garnered from their supporters. They watched with dismay as many of their youngest and brightest emulants drifted to Khomeini’s side. Hassan Shariatmadari served as his father’s closest adviser and aide during this time and recalled his father’s shock when Khomeini attracted enough adherents to emerge as a marja in his own right. “Most people had still not heard his name,” he said. At this time, Iranian newspapers and television were still expressly forbidden from mentioning Khomeini’s name or even publishing his portrait. Later, Shariatmadari and the others found out what had happened. “Two years before the revolution, Khomeini got $16 million from Libya through the son of Ayatollah Montazeri. He used this money to pay the talebs [religious students], and this allowed Khomeini to become a marja.” Seminarians were reliant on the stipends they received from their marja, and in Khomeini’s case he simply purchased their allegiance by outbidding his peers. “We knew a mullah in a far village who was getting 20,000 tomans from Khomeini, whereas my father had been giving him 5,000 tomans,” said Shariatmadari. “We were astonished. We did not know the sources of the money.”
Libyan cash supplemented even vaster sums raised inside Iran to support revolutionary activities. In 1977 Khomeini’s field commander at home was Seyyed Mohammad Hussein Beheshti, now Ayatollah Beheshti, who twelve years earlier had condemned to death Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansur. In the late sixties Beheshti, described by CIA analysts as “rabidly anti-Shah and an unwavering and unquestioning supporter of Khomeini,” moved to Hamburg in West Germany to found the city’s Islamic Center. Beheshti was a brilliant organizer and tactician who played the lead in forging alliances between religious hard-liners and secular left-wing Iranian student groups based in Europe, two groups united solely by their hatred for the Shah and the monarchy. From Hamburg, Beheshti returned to Iran to serve as Khomeini’s liaison to the National Front and Liberation Movement. His biggest contribution, however, was as the revolutionary movement’s fund-raiser in chief. “The funds Beheshti has been able to raise in the bazaar are considerable,” reported CIA agents who estimated that “on a normal day” friendly merchants donated $285,000 or 2 million tomans to Khomeini’s underground cells. The U.S. intelligence agency made one other notable observation: “Beheshti also functions as Khomeini’s conduit for distributing funds to the terrorist group Mujahedin which targeted Americans for assassination in the early 1970s.”
These immense sums ensured that student revolutionaries like Ali Hossein were never short of money and resources. Some of his friends volunteered to be sent to terrorist training camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to learn how to handle guns and explosives. They returned home to form paramilitary groups, which were quietly dispersed around Tehran mosques whose basements became storage places for military hardware. “The level of organization was very developed and quite complex,” said the young revolutionary. “It was not difficult to get guns. Guns were available. We produced our own hand grenades in Tehran.” There were even training grounds inside Iran, up in the mountains, where hardened fighters trained recruits to handle weapons, plant bombs, and use large crowds as cover from which to attack the security forces.
The Shah was repeatedly assured by General Nasiri that terrorist groups posed no threat to Iran’s stability or his survival. In September 1977, he boasted to Kayhan that “there are still between 100 and 200 terrorists left in Iran.” He made it clear he wasn’t worried. The captures and killings of the Mujahedin’s top leadership in the summer and autumn of 1976 had been followed by the lull in terrorist activity that led the Shah and Nasiri to believe—erroneously, as it turned out—that the security forces had finally gained the upper hand in their “dirty war” against subversion. “We totally destroyed them,” confirmed Parviz Sabeti. “Two thousand were in prison or killed. We had the best security conditions in six or seven years.” With this assurance in mind, the Shah believed he could achieve his objective of loosening controls while reining in the security forces. Back in Washington, the CIA expressed skepticism. “On the basis of fragmentary information, we estimate Iranian terrorists to number more than 1,000,” concluded a U.S. intelligence estimate compiled in late 1977. “Terrorist organizations appear to have no trouble in recruiting members from Iran’s large student population.” The terrorists “have the expertise to assemble powerful explosive devices, probably efficient enough, if properly placed on a major petroleum facility, to do substantial damage.” The Americans found evidence that “terrorists are indeed interested in disrupting the economy. Terrorists in 1975 bombed electrical power lines outside Tehran that resulted in power outages.” Iranian counterterrorist measures had so far focused on crushing the threat from inside the country. But these measures “will probably not be effective until the security services devise means to cut off the internal terrorist network from its external base of support.” Remarkably, the Americans were unaware that Mujahedin agents had infiltrated their own embassy even as they concluded the terrorist group had developed the capacity to monitor Savak’s internal communications.
Ambassador Sullivan’s embassy rejected the CIA analysis and shared Nasiri’s confidence that the insurgency was broken. “We knew firepower was coming in,” said diplomat John Stempel, deputy head of the political section. “We didn’t know how much of it there was. There was enough border fluidity in northern Iran to make it possible. But the light weapons and machine guns were not significant. A lot of the revolutionaries were trained in Lebanon, so you would expect there would be a cadre trained there. We were aware of it.”
* * *
IN JULY 1977 Court Minister Asadollah Alam flew to his rented villa in the south of France. Racked with cancer, Alam was anxious about the mess he had left behind in Tehran. He saw only one bright spot on the horizon: the Shah had finally summoned the nerve to replace Hoveyda as prime minister. For months, Alam had been patiently urging the Shah to clean house and appoint a strong, independent executive who could withstand American diplomatic pressure. Before he left Tehran, Alam thought he secured from the Shah a pledge to appoint Iran’s tough-minded finance and economy minister Hushang Ansary, an official who enjoyed good relations with the commanders of the armed forces and senior clerics. Alam felt confident that Ansary, a consummate negotiator, would not hesitate to maintain order during liberalization. The mood at Niavaran was expectant and the Ansary family began receiving congratulatory telephone calls and floral bouquets. Ansary’s wife, Maryam, was visiting Alam in Antibes, and the French government prepared to send bodyguards down in anticipation of her husband’s appointment. In the event, they weren’t needed.
On Friday, August 5, the Shah telephoned Alam and asked for his ailing minister’s resignation. Alam may have been grateful to be relieved of the burden. His mood darkened the following day, however, when the Shah called again, this time with the news that he had decided to replace Hoveyda not with Ansary but with Jamshid Amuzegar, Iran’s minister of the interior and chief oil negotiator. Known as a talented economist, and reputed to be on warm terms with senior U.S. officials, Amuzegar lacked the common touch that Iranians expected from their politicians. In public he came across as officious, haughty, and disdainful. This suited the Shah, who was still distrustful of professional politicians. Hoveyda, despite his faults, was a raconteur who could charm people in small groups or large gatherings. Alam was doubly outraged that instead of consigning Hoveyda to oblivion or exile the Shah appointed him as the new head of the Court Ministry. The Shah had apparently buckled when Hoveyda burst into tears at the news he would lose his post as prime minister and placated him by assigning him to the Court Ministry. “His Majesty is not thinking clearly,” Alam mused out loud. “This has nothing to do with his sickness. The country is lost.”