Stop it when it gets into the streets.
—THE SHAH
This time either Islam triumphs or we disappear.
—GRAND AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI
On September 23, 1977, the King and Queen attended the University of Tehran’s forty-fourth annual graduation ceremony, a routine event on an otherwise quiet day in the Iranian capital. Liberalization was moving ahead. Hundreds of political prisoners had already been released, censorship laws relaxed, and newspapers were permitted to publish articles on corruption, government incompetence, and the economy. Senior civil servants were ordered to make their assets and salaries public, and reforms were announced to make the judiciary more accountable and independent. The Iranian people were encouraged to attend assemblies organized by the Rastakhiz Party, where they could debate politics and air grievances. Most striking was the Shah’s announcement of an “open space,” allowing respectable regime opponents to meet and organize on condition that they refrained from criticizing the Shah or calling for a republic. Longtime activists such as Mehdi Bazargan suspected a ruse. They recalled the open atmosphere of the early 1960s, when reforms had been followed by repression. Younger activists, however, looked forward to testing the limits of the open space.
For Queen Farah, the ceremony at Tehran University came at the end of a difficult few weeks. For the past several years conservatives at court had argued that the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, one of her signature patronages, was too avant-garde for Iranian tastes and caused needless offense to the clergy. Scorn turned to anger in August 1977 when the eleventh Shiraz-Persepolis Festival almost descended into street riots. The Squat Theater, an experimental Hungarian troupe based in New York, staged a production of its show Pig, Child, Fire! in an empty storefront window in the main Shiraz bazaar. In the play’s climactic scene a young mother was raped by a soldier in front of her child. The atmosphere in the bazaar was already a combustible scene, with American tourists buying trinkets from stall owners, who broadcast cassette tapes of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini calling for revolution and railing against American influence. By way of coincidence, the Shah’s granddaughter Princess Mahnaz was in the bazaar that day and overheard Khomeini’s voice. She stumbled across Pig, Child, Fire! as the show was already under way and noticed the crowd start to boil as a rumor spread that the actors had actually performed a live public sex act. Police officers rushed to the bazaar to prevent an outbreak of rioting, but public revulsion could not be contained. From Najaf, Khomeini issued a statement condemning what he described as the “indecent acts” perpetrated on the people of Shiraz and demanded local religious leaders “speak out and protest.”
The scandal provided ammunition for Farah’s conservative critics in government and at court. At a time when religious passions were running high they argued that the Queen needed to lower her public profile. Shiraz, they argued, had been an accident waiting to happen. These critics reserved special enmity for her cousin Reza Ghotbi, whose state radio and television monopoly sanctioned programming that took sly digs at the Shah’s authoritarian regime. But Farah’s public works were more nuanced than they appeared to conservatives. She used the proceeds from her foundation to preserve and restore old mosques that had fallen into disrepair. Iran’s most ardent feminist defended the right of women to stay home and raise children in the conventional manner. One of her new initiatives was the Festival of Popular Traditions, which championed traditional village culture. In the rush to find a scapegoat for Shiraz, however, these achievements were overlooked.
One month later, Farah sat mute beside her husband while university graduates filed past to collect their diplomas. She had attended hundreds of similar events over the years, each one following the same unerring script. This time, however, something unusual happened when several students stood up before the assembly to warn that extremists had infiltrated the university with the intention of instigating “plots to create campus unrest.” One student referenced the involvement of religious radicals in the 1949 assassination attempt on the Shah’s life and the 1963 uprising against the White Revolution. A second student rejected international criticism of Iran’s record on human rights, while a third appealed to Iranians living abroad to return home “to become acquainted with the new realities of modern Iran, and to enjoy the fruits of our success and prosperity.” This clumsy piece of staged theater caused outrage among faculty, administrators, and students who regarded it as an effort by Savak to hijack and politicize the signature event of the academic calendar. Tensions were already running high on campus, and the demonstration of loyalty before the Imperial couple was all that was needed to strike the match of conflagration.
* * *
AT THE START of the new school year, student revolutionary Ali Hossein was on the run.
The young man’s identity as a courier for the Khomeini movement was discovered by Parviz Sabeti’s agents, who ordered his arrest. He fled his dormitory room at the University of Tehran for a safe house where “we could become more and more active.” Hossein’s underground cell received orders to start testing the boundaries of the “open space” and bait the security forces with staged provocations that they hoped would draw blood, create martyrs, and generate public sympathy. Violent disorders would embarrass the Shah before the eyes of the world and expose liberalization as a sham. In the absence of a crackdown, however, revolutionary cells would take advantage of the resulting security vacuum to cause further instability. Either way, the revolutionaries would win. “Our goal was to confront the regime in some way, show our opposition in some way,” said Hossein. The debacle at the university graduation ceremony created new opportunities to stoke unrest. “We made demonstrations and created problems for the regime under the banner of some excuse, pretending that our activities were not political.” The provocateurs decided to stage their biggest attack yet inside the university’s student cafeteria, acting under the guise of protesting the mingling between male and female students at mealtimes. Hossein was already personally offended by the behavior of young women on campus. “In the mosques the genders were segregated. The girls [on campus] wore makeup and Western clothes. In the cafeteria at that time when we were taking tea there was no separate facility for the girls.”
On Sunday, October 9, 1977, twenty religious extremists wearing balaclavas rushed into Tehran University’s parking lot and set fire to student buses. The attack on the buses proved a diversionary tactic. While security guards doused the flames, the young men stormed into the student cafeteria, smashing and kicking in windows and forcibly pulling apart the boys from the girls. The scene inside was one of panic and pandemonium. Screaming students ran for cover, and those who offered resistance were set upon and beaten to the ground. Before the assailants ran off they dropped a pamphlet titled, “Warning to the Elements of Corruption.” In it they threatened the life of any female student caught socializing with male friends.
Don’t ever come to the self-service restaurant in the boys’ section [of the dormitory]. Don’t ever, under any pretext, even for getting food, come to the boys’ area. In no way may you ride the boys’ bus. Put pressure on the officials of the dormitory and demand a separate self-service restaurant, as well as a bus. If you violate the guideline, your lives will have no guarantee of safety.
The assault on Iran’s oldest and most prestigious university made front-page news across the country. One professor described the episode as a “revolting attempt to revive medieval horrors,” an allusion to Sharia law, which forbade casual mixing of the sexes. The chancellor said it was the worst display of violence he could remember in his eleven years on the job. The head of the student union appealed to the anonymous assailants to come forward to talk about their concerns rather than resort to violence. University coeds staged a four-hour sit-in, promising they would “not allow shameful ideas to be propagated on the campus, which is a center of progress and the home of the nation’s enlightened youth.” They were supported by the Women’s Organization of Iran, a women’s rights organization headed by Princess Ashraf, which held a press conference on campus to denounce religious extremism.
Ultimately, however, the efforts of student leaders to rouse their peers was met with a sullen wall of silence. Leftist students suspected the secret police had staged the attack to smear their hero Khomeini as a fanatic. Religious students fully supported segregation anyway. Most students, not wanting trouble, warily submitted to intimidation. The result was that Tehran University’s self-service cafeteria was segregated, and bus drivers refused to drive onto campus grounds. Ali Hossein’s revolutionary cell had succeeded in its mission to paralyze the administration of the nation’s top university and terrorize the student body into submission.
Students and intellectuals weren’t alone in assuming that Savak was behind the cafeteria invasion. In the shadowy world of counterintelligence and subversion, the secret police had a long history of staging provocations to discredit opponents of the regime. Even government officials such as Minister of Women’s Affairs Mahnaz Afkhami suspected Parviz Sabeti’s Third Directorate was to blame. His agents targeted her for harassment because they believed her ministry employed too many leftists and dissidents. “The only negative article written about me was planted by Savak,” she claimed. “They said I wore a see-through blouse with boots and drank whiskey.” Galvanized by the attack on Tehran University, a pro-Khomeini mob took to the streets of Rey three days later demanding the release of Seyyed Mehdi Hashemi, a hard-line mullah sentenced to death for his role in a series of assassinations in Isfahan.
Both incidents drew the Shah’s condemnation. On Saturday, October 14, he received a delegation of parliamentary leaders at the palace. While they stood in respectful silence he read out a tough statement deploring those who would try to take advantage of liberalization. “All these developments smell highly of counterrevolution, black reaction, and outright treason,” he lectured his audience. “They want to set the country back, not only to pre-Shah-people revolution times, but also to circumstances prevalent fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago.” Without naming Khomeini, the Shah made it clear who he believed was behind the violence. “How coordinated these internal and external developments are! One should not be surprised because they originate from the same center. Their orders come from the same source.” He insisted that he would not be deterred from opening up the political system. Liberalization was irreversible: “And those who think otherwise or act in response to orders from foreigners or their agents should realize that their actions will not delay our progress as much as one ten thousandth of a second.” As though to prove his point, the Shah allowed a series of open poetry readings hosted by West Germany’s Goethe Institute to proceed. European and American diplomats were shocked when as many as fifteen thousand Iranians showed up to attend the receptions, using the venues to debate the country’s political future without fear of censorship or arrest. The security forces watched warily outside the institute but otherwise made no effort to break up the gathering. “It was absolutely unbelievable,” said one lawyer. “I thought I wasn’t in Iran. I kept expecting the goons to come in and take us all away, but nothing happened.”
Opposition leader Mehdi Bazargan also decided to test the new open space by announcing his first public speech in almost fifteen years. His choice of venue, a large mosque in the heart of downtown Tehran, was highly provocative, and his remarks warning against false idolatry were clearly aimed at the Shah, whose portrait was displayed in every public and many private buildings. But Bazargan’s event passed off peacefully, too. “His people were well organized with loudspeakers so they could reach a crowd which at times numbered twenty thousand,” reported one observer. “Going among them [were the] young and fairly well to do.”
* * *
QUEEN FARAH’S THIRTY-NINTH birthday fell on October 14. Around the country, hundreds of local development initiatives were inaugurated in her name. She spent the day handing out awards to a group of eight hundred science and medical researchers at Tehran University. Prime Minister Amuzegar and Minister of Education and Science Manuchehr Ganji arrived to help her blow out the candles on a huge birthday cake.
To celebrate Farah’s birthday the Pahlavis invited their good friends former U.S. vice president Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Happy, to attend the gala opening of Tehran’s new Museum of Contemporary Art. “A huge filmy sky sculpture floated above Farah Park Thursday evening, a symbol of the heady new status of Tehran in the artistic world,” wrote one observer. Farah had conceived the project ten years earlier and kept a close eye on all aspects of design and construction, to the point of inviting her cousin Kamran Diba to assume the job of principal architect. They both shared a vision of making art accessible to the people. “A lot of Iranians still think of museums and art galleries as religious places, only for scholars and artists,” Diba told reporters. “But we have the ideal setting in the park, and we hope people will just wander in.” Rather than cater to a specialized clientele, the museum’s board approved an admission fee of only twenty rials and made opening hours six days a week until eight in the evening. There were live musical and theatrical performances, workshops and film theaters for children, and specially funded programs to encourage young artists. Children’s books and audiovisual presentations were commissioned and taken to local schools so schoolchildren could be exposed to art from an early age.
Farah’s hectic work schedule never let up. On a single day in October 1977 she flew to Isfahan to open the first Festival of Popular Traditions, a weeklong affair intended to highlight tribal arts and culture; inaugurated an exhibition of Iranian handicrafts; awarded prizes to the winners of the Third and Fourth Festival of Theater; visited the historic Naqsh-e Jahan building; received the board of directors of the Reza Pahlavi Cultural Foundation’s local branch; and watched a play put on by students of the Isfahan International School. Two days later she flew to Kerman to open one of her personal projects, a new museum dedicated to Iranian folk art. Back in Tehran, the leading advocate for Iran’s disabled communities called on the government to devote more resources to helping the blind and the deaf. In the autumn of 1977 the Queen seemed to be everywhere. Her husband, by contrast, appeared to be quietly receding from the spotlight.
* * *
QUESTIONS OF MORTALITY were on the mind of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini following the sudden death of his eldest son on the twenty-third of October. Mostafa Khomeini had been his father’s most trusted aide and the last voice of moderation in his inner circle. Though Mostafa suffered from health problems related to obesity, his father made no attempt to correct conspiracy theories that claimed he had been poisoned by Parviz Sabeti’s agents. Eleven of the twelve imams of Shiism had been assassinated by poison, and Mostafa Khomeini’s death conveniently played into the Shia narrative of martyrdom at the hands of an unjust ruler. Later, Khomeini ascribed the death of his son to “God’s hidden providence.”
The Shia tradition called for forty days of mourning followed by a memorial service. The release of pent-up grief after more than a month usually accounted for very public displays of emotion. Though Khomeini was forbidden from returning home, his representatives in Iran petitioned the government to permit mourning vigils in the mosques. Parviz Sabeti suspected they wanted to use the services as an excuse to organize, and he warned General Nasiri of his misgivings. The Shah was hesitant to deny the Marja’s relatives the right to grieve and assented to their request, never doubting that the security forces would maintain order if trouble started. “Stop it when it gets into the streets,” he instructed Nasiri.
With permission in hand, Khomeini’s relatives and admirers published a notice of mourning in the newspaper Kayhan referring to Mostafa as “the offspring of the Exalted Leader of All Shiites of the World.” This public letter provided an excuse for several hundred sympathetic clergymen to sign their own notice of condolence. At Mostafa Khomeini’s memorial service at the Jam’e Mosque in Tehran, presiding cleric Ayatollah Taheri Esfahani prayed for “our one and only leader, the defender of the faith and the great combatant of Islam, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.” In an instant the fourteen-year taboo against mentioning Khomeini’s name inside Iran was broken and “thunderous cries of ‘Allah Akbar’” or “God is Great” echoed through the mosque. “And it spread,” recalled Parviz Sabeti. “The forty-day mourning period was the time when the Khomeini people really got organized.” Groups on the left took their cue and also published open letters praising Mostafa Khomeini. Heartened by the expressions of support, Khomeini decided that Iran was on the brink of upheaval. He had been closely following the bad news on the economy, the corruption scandals, and the Shah’s attempts to reform his regime. He spoiled for a final showdown with the man he ridiculed as “that unfit element.”
The Coalition of Islamic Societies ordered its revolutionary cells to step up provocations. In the first incident of its kind, on November 5 an anonymous caller telephoned the Paramount Cinema on Takht-e Jamshid Avenue in Tehran, just down the road from the U.S. embassy, and accused the owners of screening Western “pornography.” A bomb was discovered hidden in a lavatory, and the complex was hastily evacuated while it was defused. The extremists were also galvanized by the behavior and attitudes of President Carter and his representatives in Iran. Convinced that the Shah’s liberalization program was the result of U.S. pressure, Khomeini’s men rejoiced on November 15 when the Pahlavi state visit to Washington, DC, was disrupted by violent protests outside the White House. Televised images of the Iranian and American First Couples tear-gassed and harried by demonstrators gripped the imagination of the Iranian public, whose culture and historical awareness did not allow for accident or incompetence. They concluded that the American president had staged the unrest to embarrass his guests, whom he now apparently regarded as liabilities. This leap of logic, so alien to American sensibilities, made complete sense from an Iranian perspective.
The Islamic Coalition’s revolutionary cells were fully activated, and saboteurs like Ali Hossein fanned out around the country to stoke unrest and cause mayhem. Isolated acts of violence were reported in several towns where banks, travel agencies, cinemas, and facilities identified with modernization and the White Revolution were attacked. On November 24 in Shiraz pro-Khomeini militants rioted outside a mosque smashing windows, setting fire to two cinemas, and storming the main synagogue, whose carpets were doused with gasoline and set ablaze. Bomb threats were phoned in to more than a hundred family welfare centers established to cater to mothers living in poor neighborhoods such as the Tehran slum districts of Darvazeh Gar and Naziabaz. Women came to the centers, run by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, to learn to read and write and receive instruction in postnatal care, hygiene, health, and nutrition. Trained staff provided them with family planning information and employment and legal counseling services. Ninety of the centers also offered child-care facilities for mothers with infants and toddlers. Starting in November, male callers threatened to blow up welfare centers in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Kerman. “There was a lot of panic and disruption,” recalled Minister of Women’s Affairs Mahnaz Afkhami. “We would have to evacuate the children to safety. Then we would bring them back and another threat would be phoned in and it would start all over again.” Unrest erupted on major university campuses, where leftists broke windows and assaulted administrators. The first targeting of American citizens was reported on December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, when a touring American college wrestling team was attacked in the cafeteria at Aryamehr University by Iranian students chanting anti-U.S. slogans. The Iranians desecrated the Stars and Stripes and declared their support for the opposing Russian team.
One of the Shah’s proudest achievements was the infusion of Western technology to develop Iran’s economy. But just as the security forces could not possibly stop every tape cassette of Khomeini’s speeches from entering the country, so too were they powerless to prevent the Xerox machines then coming into fashion in offices in the capital from being used as weapons to fight the regime. “Tens of thousands of copies of protest petitions have found their way into circulation because nearly every office in Tehran has a copying machine,” reported one American who visited the capital in the autumn of 1977. “Thank God for the Xerox machine,” chortled an opposition activist. “I don’t think the man who invented the copying machine was aware of what he was doing for freedom of expression.”
Even the Shah’s efforts to tackle corruption and waste in government had a boomerang effect. When Jamshid Amuzegar became prime minister he had sought the advice of Parviz Sabeti. “I never had any political experience before now,” he admitted. “What can I do to succeed?” Sabeti told him that opposition parties such as the National Front, Liberation Movement of Iran, and Tudeh already had well-crafted political programs that told the people what they stood for. “You have to set your agenda,” he advised. “I told him [Rastakhiz] should be moderate, pragmatic, and nationalist. He needed a short-term program.” He also recommended the new government start airing grievances in a public forum such as a stadium. Amuzegar liked the idea and took it to the Shah, who rejected it as “ridiculous. If you do it, bring it to the royal court.” This was the origin of the notorious Imperial Commission, tasked with rooting out evidence of corruption and waste in government agencies and in the business community. The Shah appointed Hossein Fardust, his oldest friend and Nasiri’s deputy at Savak, to head the commission, whose proceedings were televised live rather like the Nixon-era Watergate investigation in the United States. He expected to be applauded for making government more transparent and accountable—isn’t that what the liberals had been clamoring for all these years? But Sabeti was aghast that his original idea had evolved into a public witch hunt of the civil service: “I thought party members would talk about lifestyle problems but when it was on TV it reached a mass audience.”
Month after month, Iranians watched in dismay as public officials were hauled in front of a panel and grilled under klieg lights about project overruns, missing millions, and kickbacks. In the second week of November 1977 the commission released reports on delays in road, rail, and port construction; problems affecting the electrical grid; and shortages of skilled labor to keep power generators running. Nosratollah Moinian, head of the Shah’s Special Bureau, took the lead in denouncing “incompetence and negligence among certain government executives,” and the Shah personally ordered the arrest of a former energy minister and two associates for their role in the summer power outages that had left the capital blacked out during a heat wave. But the Shah’s decision to involve himself in matters best left to prosecutors and the court system sent the signal that he was putting his own regime on trial. The depressing catalog of failures and lost public funds only served to reinforce the widespread popular belief that the White Revolution had run aground. The commission reinforced the idea that the government was corrupt and inept, and it helped collapse the confidence of the civil service, which was staffed by the white-collar middle class. These professionals regarded the Shah’s personal involvement in the investigations as a singular act of disloyalty. Businessmen also began to lose confidence in the regime, regarding the commission as an attempt to find scapegoats for the government’s own failures. Far from helping to restore public confidence in the system, the Imperial Commission played an instrumental role in discrediting state institutions and undermining public morale.
* * *
AMBASSADOR WILLIAM SULLIVAN closely followed the sudden surge in unrest around the country, though from the start he misunderstood its origins. Sullivan and his political counselors, section head George Lambrakis and his deputy John Stempel, appeared more concerned with the behavior of the Shah’s security forces than the shadowy men behind the unrest. In recent weeks, anxious to build relations with the anti-Shah opposition, they had made contact with moderate leftists and republicans who assured them Parviz Sabeti’s Third Directorate was staging provocations to prove to the Shah that the “open space” had gone too far and that tough measures were required to restore law and order. The Americans accepted this explanation. They were certainly aware of who Khomeini was but made no real attempt to learn about his philosophy of Islamic governance; translate his writings; or track the flow of money, men, and arms from radical Arab leaders such as Arafat and Gadhafi.
On December 7, the same day the American wrestlers were set upon at Aryamehr University, and while the Shah was outside the country on a state visit to Oman, Sullivan met privately with Prime Minister Amuzegar to receive his assurance that the Iranian government would not use force to put down peaceful protests, nor would it resort to the sort of crackdowns that had led to human rights abuses in the past. He told Amuzegar that he was particularly upset over a recent incident where Savak agents had stormed a Tehran home where opposition leaders were holding a political meeting. Sullivan sent a cable to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explaining that Amuzegar had agreed to a “hands off” strategy and that he was determined to avoid at all costs repressive measures that would invite condemnation from foreign governments and human rights groups. “Amuzegar said GOI [Government of Iran] had decided to eschew police measures in handling dissent,” explained Sullivan. “Prime Minister went on to say that government particularly sought to avoid making arrests, because ‘these people want to be arrested.’ He said their tactic was to have some of their members arrested, convey the information directly to [the foreign news media], and have exaggerated reports of the arrests circulated in the United States. Then, he said, I would get a letter from a Congressman and in effect become an advocate for the person arrested.” Amuzegar told Sullivan that his government “would permit dissenting groups to continue having public meetings, signing letters, and otherwise remaining active.”
Amuzegar’s remarks reflected the Shah’s view that the Rastakhiz Party should take the lead in channeling popular unrest and directing political passions toward constructive measures rather than into the streets. That, after all, had been the basis for its establishment three years earlier. Amuzegar told Sullivan that Rastakhiz had recently organized an impressive turnout of parents to protest the violence at the University of Tehran. But Sullivan wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a promise from Amuzegar that there would be no more “head bashing” by Savak or pro-regime vigilante groups: it was important that peaceful protesters felt there were legitimate venues in which they could “vent their views. Otherwise they would become convinced there was no way within the system to advocate opposition. This in turn could convince them that violence and terrorism were the only alternatives to the current system.” Amuzegar said he “emphatically agreed” with Sullivan and that there could be no retreat from liberalization—the “open space” must remain open.
To reinforce the Shah’s message of tolerance and moderation in the face of extremism, violence, and threats, one of Iran’s most respected politicians delivered a speech that summed up government strategy. “Patience is the imperative of the current situation,” declared Abdol Majid Majidi, the leader of the more liberal of the Rastakhiz Party’s two ideological wings. The agitators, he insisted, wanted the authorities to crack down hard, to discredit liberalization. But the government would not take the bait. He repeated a recent statement by the Shah to the effect that young people often did things to “prove and test their presence before entering society.” What was going on was not so unusual. Young people were “letting off steam,” and there was no reason to be alarmed: incidents of unrest occurring around the country were harmless and to be expected.
* * *
MANY WEALTHIER Iranians did not see it that way. The Shah had launched liberalization in the hope it would strengthen middle-class support for the monarchy and show that he too was on the side of political reform. But many of the same liberals who had spent the past few years calling for democracy became alarmed at the sudden spike in unrest: Iran’s propertied class was already holding an election of sorts, and the ballots they cast were with their feet.
The 1973–1974 oil boom had been accompanied by the lifting of restrictions on the amount of capital Iranians could take out of the country. With real estate prices and inflation soaring at home, many middle- and upper-middle-class Iranians purchased properties in Europe and North America as a nest egg. The pace of capital flight began to accelerate over the summer of 1977. “I was aware of it,” recalled Hassan Ali Mehran, governor of Iran’s Central Bank. “What was a good investment policy in 1975 was a good insurance policy in 1977.” Mehran’s analysts watched as private capital worth an estimated $100 million began leaving Iran each month, bound for foreign safe havens. At the same time, consular officials at the U.S. embassy on Takht-e Jamshid Avenue noticed a sharp increase in the number of Iranians seeking visas to enter the United States. Thousands of miles away, real-estate agents in California’s San Francisco Bay Area were startled by an influx of Iranians “buying up the place,” with properties going for between $250,000 and $400,000. Farther south, Iranians were “pouring” into Los Angeles to the extent that they had “rejuvenated the place.”
Foreign residents who knew Iran well or had close ties to the government and military also began to take the Shah’s measure. They were aware of the rumors that he was ill, and they, too, doubted that liberalization could work. Businessman James Saghi “saw the writing on the wall,” remembered a colleague, “and sold his house at the top of the market for something approaching two and a half million dollars cash, which he took out of the country immediately.” American Lloyd Bertman, who ran the Jupiter Trading Company and who had lived in Iran for twenty-eight years, told associates “there are things that are happening that make me uncomfortable, so I’m going to leave.” Others were struck by the sour public mood. Chris Westberg, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of an American lawyer, had lived with her family in Iran since the midsixties. On returning after several years away at college, she was disturbed by the sour public mood and tension on the streets of Tehran. “The men seemed even more hostile than I remembered them,” she recalled. “Instead of the comments about my blue-eyes-like-the-sky or more brazen appraisals of my anatomy, there were vicious murmurs of ‘foreign whore!’” She spotted anti-American graffiti daubed on walls around town proclaiming, “Death to Jimmy Carter” and “Yonkee Go to Home.” Then there were the austere uniforms worn by young women of university age. They were decked out in “grey or khaki-colored tunics over long pants or ankle-length skirts, with matching scarves tied tightly under their chins, absolutely no make-up.” One day the young American chanced to talk to one of these stern young creatures when they shared a cab ride together. Her fellow passenger explained that she was a devout Muslim “who hoped to serve Allah and her country by obtaining a science degree from Tehran University.” Westberg suggested that the student’s education might conflict with the teachings of the Quran. Her fellow traveler retorted, “It is necessary for the changes to come.”
* * *
IN DECEMBER 1977, in the same week that Prime Minister Amuzegar assured Ambassador Sullivan that his government would not use force to suppress dissent, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini issued a public fatwa, or religious edict, from Najaf in which he declared the Shah an illegitimate ruler and condemned his rule as illegal. The editor of the Kayhan newspaper, Amir Taheri, recalled receiving “a strange handwritten [two-page] letter … peppered with a number of amusing spelling errors.” The letter had been dictated by Khomeini to his younger son Ahmad, a guerrilla fighter trained in Lebanon who since his brother Mostafa’s death had taken on the role of his father’s principal secretary. In his fatwa, Khomeini boldly announced that he had “deposed the Shah and abrogated the Constitution.” He referred to the King as the Taghut, or Satan, and signed the letter “Imam,” claiming for himself the title of one of the Prophet’s original disciples—an audacious and highly provocative gesture that had no precedent under Quranic law. Furthermore, Khomeini called on the people to withhold their taxes, refuse to obey the laws of the land, and stay away from school. Iranian intellectuals ignored the fatwa, regarding it as so outrageous and so fantastic that it could only have been produced by Savak to smear Khomeini as a lunatic.
The Shah learned of the fatwa after it had been in circulation for a week and only then from the Iraqi ambassador. According to Taheri, who saw the Shah in early December, the monarch was “still angry enough to mention [the fatwa] himself and turn it into a major topic of conversation. He would soon, he warned, call on all Iranians to choose sides.” Like Khomeini, he wanted the Iranian people to make a choice. “They must decide,” the Shah told him. “Do they want our great civilization, or would they rather live under the great terror our foreign enemies are plotting with that crazy fanatic as their instrument?” His remarks echoed his earlier comments to Princess Ashraf at the end of the summer: he wanted his son to inherit a throne without thorns. As December drew on, the Shah established a special committee and instructed it to come up with a list of strategies and measures to isolate and discredit the Islamists. At the same time, Khomeini wrote a letter to the leaders of the Coalition of Islamic Societies informing them to start their long-awaited insurrection. “The Shah must go,” he insisted. “This time either Islam triumphs or we disappear.” He left it to them to formulate a plan for revolt. This would be no easy task—the revolutionaries faced the unenviable feat of stirring unrest without bringing down upon their followers the full weight of the fifth-strongest army in the world.
Week by week, day by day, the provocations escalated. In the last two weeks of December 1977 the Iranian embassy in Denmark was invaded and ransacked, and in Tehran and other major cities banks and businesses associated with Americans, Jews, and the Baha’i, a minority Islamic sect, were assaulted.
There was a respite only on Christmas Day when Queen Farah and her children welcomed to Niavaran a group of American students traveling around the world to promote their message of peace.
* * *
THE SABOTAGE OPERATIONS and violent protests staged by the Khomeini movement were choreographed to coincide with the arrival in Tehran on New Year’s Eve of President Carter. The American was on the second stop of a seven-nation, nine-day presidential tour of European, Asian, and Middle East capitals. Originally scheduled for late November, Carter’s trip had been pushed back to the New Year when the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, legislation to promote energy independence, faced defeat on Capitol Hill. The significance of the trip did not become apparent until much later when it became a symbol for political collapse and the opening act in a grand historical drama, the prelude to disaster and a terrifying metaphor for future shock.
Despite his personal disdain for the Shah, Carter was anxious to mend fences with the only leader in the Middle East who enjoyed close relations with the president of Egypt and prime minister of Israel, both of whom were involved in intensive U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations. The Shah was President Sadat’s friend and as Israel’s main supplier of oil the Shah was well placed to exert leverage on Prime Minister Menachim Begin to accept painful territorial concessions. Still, Carter did not want to appear too closely associated with the Shah, whose human rights record had earned international opprobrium. The seventeen hours he planned to spend in Tehran seemed about right, just enough time to make a courtesy call and to refuel on the way to New Delhi. Carter was about to depart the Polish capital Warsaw when a time bomb exploded in the washroom of the Iran-America Society’s language school in Tehran, wrecking the ground-floor administration offices and injuring a security guard.
Air Force One’s slow descent over the mountains of eastern Turkey and northern Iran on the afternoon of December 31, 1977, afforded Jimmy Carter his first look at the country that over the next year would dictate his political future, decide the fate of Islam as a force for change in the world, and define the contours of the new century whose blurred lines were already taking shape. In the hour before he landed, Carter conferred one last time with his senior aides Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Assistant for National Security Affairs Zbigniew Brzezinski, and officials who handled Iranian affairs. Also aboard was Gary Sick, the desk officer for Iranian affairs serving on the National Security Council. The presidential caravan included dozens of White House advisers, support staff, bodyguards, newspaper and television reporters, celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters, and Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. But as Air Force One approached the Iranian frontier over Turkey, starting its final approach over the great desert plateau that Cyrus and Alexander had once conquered, the fifty-three-year-old president had thoughts other than politics and diplomacy on his mind.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had prepared for the trip by showing their daughter, Amy, an illustrated picture book of life in Iran. The Carters were both born-again Christians and had looked forward to seeing the lands of the Old Testament for the first time. The couple peered out the windows of their compartment over the arid moonscape, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mountain where Noah’s Ark settled during the Great Flood. Excitement quickly turned to disappointment. “Although it was a clear day,” Carter wrote in his diary, “we never were sure whether or not we saw Mount Ararat to the north.” Despite the unobstructed view, the president of the United States could not see what he was looking for in the open skies over southwest Asia.
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ON THE EVE of President Carter’s arrival in Tehran, a cold front rolled down from Soviet Central Asia, coating the Alborz Mountains with a foot of silver frosting that chilled the air in the Iranian capital. The ski fields at Dizin, a short drive from the northern suburbs, were open for the season, and the northern cities of Mashad, Tabriz, and Kermanshah were already well blanketed. To the south, the Kharkeh River in Khuzestan Province burst its banks and flooded farmland, and mud seeped into the municipal water supply of Ahwaz. Iranians cheered their football team’s victory over Australia to advance to the play-offs of the soccer World Cup, due to be held the following summer in Argentina. A team of Iranian mountaineers declared their intention to become the first non-Chinese climbers to scale Mount Everest from Tibet. The death toll from the recent temblor in Kerman rose to six hundred. Iran’s broadcast authority announced that next summer state television would make the switch from black-and-white to color.
Artists and audiences flew in from around the world to enjoy what promised to be Tehran’s most brilliant winter season yet for the performing arts. Acclaimed mime artist Marcel Marceau, French pop singer Joe Dassin, and renowned Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson were all booked to perform in the New Year, with Nilsson at the Rudaki Hall reprising her signature role in Tristan und Isolde, accompanied by the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. Large crowds turned out for exhibitions celebrating the art of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in Tehran’s dazzling new Museum of Contemporary Art. The King and Queen opened an exhibition of African art and inaugurated the Tenth Festival of Arts and Culture by attending the opening night performance of Romeo and Juliet. Iranian film director Shahpur Gharib scooped top honors and the prized golden statue at the Twelfth International Festival for Children and Young Adults for his movie Summer Vacation. Hollywood had recently discovered Iran’s potential as a movie location. Filming was under way on Caravans, starring Anthony Quinn, Christopher Lee, Joseph Cotten, and Jennifer O’Neill. O’Neill delighted the social pages when she announced her engagement to a local businessman from Isfahan. Novelist Alex Haley, the author of Roots, was received at Niavaran by the Queen. Movie buffs flocked to the Tehran International Film Festival to see Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, and Barbra Streisand’s A Star Is Born. At the Italian Theater on Avenue France, the Crown Players, an amateur expatriate theatrical group, held final dress rehearsals for their Persian-themed pantomime version of Dick Whittington. In a nod to their surroundings, the streets of London were given Iranian names, and references to Christmas were struck in favor of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
At the central fish market, housewives waited in line to buy white fish from the Caspian, though over the winter dealers charged such exorbitant prices for a single fish—as much as 2,500 to 3,000 rials—that dark brown halva from the Persian Gulf was once again back in fashion. Shoppers in the main bazaar grumbled about high prices and shortages of basic food items such as table salt, eggs, and chickens. Eager to cash in, merchants were caught cheating customers by selling nylon bags half filled with sand instead of salt. Demand for dairy products far outstripped supply. “Get your milk and yogurt before 8 a.m. or you will go without,” Tehranis were warned. Consumption of milk had shot up 36 percent in just twelve months, far in excess of the capital’s 560-ton daily milk supply. Power outages didn’t help. The influx of new migrants from the provinces and construction of new factories and office buildings placed enormous strain on the city’s power grid. Electrical failures temporarily knocked out milk and yogurt production at the pasteurized milk plant. A nationwide shortage of eggs prompted the government to import two thousand tons of eggs to meet demand in Tehran and other cities. Even beer, a staple in a city that proudly boasted its own breweries, rose 10 percent in price so that a small bottle of beer now cost 25 rials and a big bottle went for 30 rials.
In the thirty-sixth year of the Shah’s reign his capital resembled a glass, steel, and concrete behemoth that flooded an eighty-five-mile-square radius stretching from the foothills of the Alborz Mountains to the edge of the great salt desert. Tehran’s population now exceeded 4.5 million, with 200,000 new arrivals expected each year and the number of city residents doubling on average every eleven years. The runaway growth of recent decades had outpaced the ability of local government to maintain services, and the combination of weather and traffic served only to aggravate popular discontent. In the autumn of 1977 unseasonably heavy rains caused the water table beneath southern Tehran to suddenly rise, backing up sewers, overflowing drains, and flooding poorer neighborhoods in the southern suburbs as well as the central business district. Surface water brought traffic to a halt in a metropolis where every morning another five hundred vehicles were added to rush-hour traffic, which peaked as early as seven in the morning. “Private cars, taxis, minibuses, single- and double-decker city buses, heavy trucks, and trailers can be seen as early as four in the morning to late at night,” remembered one resident.
With only 1,200 traffic police to monitor 12,000 roads, and 109 filling stations to service almost 1.5 million cars, daily travel around the capital was a real challenge. The traditional Persian disdain for regulations and laws of any sort didn’t help. In Tehran there was a sort of freewheeling anarchy on the streets, with motorists slicing across divider lanes, driving up on sidewalks, barreling through traffic intersections and red lights, and heading in the opposite direction down one-way streets. Collisions led to raised tempers, fistfights, and broken bones. Iran had one of the world’s highest rates of fatalities involving children because ambulances were often stuck in traffic. Traffic was so bad that Crown Prince Reza made front-page news when he placed an anonymous phone call to Mayor Javad Shahrestani’s live radio and television program Direct Contact, pointing out that too many traffic lights did not work and that uneven hatches covering sewage ducts made the roads even more hazardous.
The capital’s poor southern suburbs were plagued by overcrowding, poor sanitation, and shortages of clean drinking water. An estimated 700,000 residents who lived there were either unemployed or underemployed. The heavy autumn rains that flooded “sewage wells and filth-choked jubes” caused a cholera outbreak made worse by “the piles of garbage left on street corners and the presence of packs of wild dogs, both threats to health.” City councillors representing southern wards complained that the municipal budget was weighted in favor of the wealthier north. Whereas northerners were allotted one street cleaner per sixty residents, said Councillor Hossein Sharbiani, in Mesgarabad in the south there was only one cleaner for 720 residents. In the southern districts of Naziabad and Javadieh there was one worker for every 540 residents, but in Takhte Tavous in the north there was one municipal worker for every 190 people. Disparities like this fed the grievances of poorer Tehranis who every day took buses to Shemiran to clean, sweep, and cook for the wealthy.
The authorities were finally responding to mounting public anger. In December, Mayor Shahrestani unveiled a five-year roadworks plan to tackle congestion and get the city moving again. Construction started on the first section of Tehran’s new French-designed subway, whose 2.8-mile tunnel connecting Mirdamad to Abassabad Avenue was set to open in January 1981. The proposed new metro stations were specially designed to double as bomb shelters in the event of aerial bombardment during a war. Work also began on a new international airport nineteen miles south of the capital. Final approval was granted for what would be remembered as one of the Shah’s finest urban legacies, a twelve-mile-long, half-mile-wide forested green belt designed to improve air quality, preserve agricultural farmland, and protect the city from desert sandstorms. The National Iranian Oil Company announced the installation of new equipment at its Tehran refinery to reduce the content of lead in gasoline. The Ministry of Energy announced plans to build a 20-billion-rial sewage treatment plant to service southern Tehran. The city’s fourth water filter plant was on the brink of completion.
One group of young entrepreneurs decided not to wait for official action and imported forty-two battery-run cars capable of driving distances of up to sixty kilometers. Demand was not exactly overwhelming in Tehran for automobiles that sat only two passengers, had limited mileage, and cost 225,000 rials. Nevertheless, by the end of the year four battery-powered CitiCars had appeared on Tehran city streets. They were taken as yet another sign that Iranians had embraced science and technology and were ready for the challenges of the eighties. Help was on the way. The question was whether they had the patience to wait that long.