Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the thing that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid things seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets,
And graves have yawned, and yielded up their dead.
—JULIUS CAESAR, ACT 2, SCENE 2
All the elements of trouble are on the loose and unleashed.
—THE SHAH
From the heights, the winter city unfolded like a crush of black velvet and white light, spilling down the slopes of the Alborz Mountains as though every diamond in the Queen’s jewel box had been flung onto the desert floor. Tonight, the lights of northern Tehran shimmered and glowed with a special brilliance. With the New Year only a few hours away, a round of house parties was about to get under way. Hostesses and servants put the final touches to dinner tables; checked place settings; and strung lights, streamers, and decorations. One of the biggest house parties was a fancy dress bash at the home of John Hoyer, general manager of Scandinavian Airlines, and his wife, Hanne. Their guests included Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife, Pat, and diplomats and business executives from a dozen countries. The hilltop home of Iran’s ambassador to Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi, back in town for one of his infrequent visits, was a “busy hive of activity,” with baskets of flowers arriving “almost every other minute” from admirers.
Tehran’s hotels anticipated a busy night. The InterContinental boasted Polynesian and French-themed restaurants, a “snazzy disco” on the ground floor, and assured guests a celebratory midnight glass of champagne “on the house.” The Sheraton promised “an exciting and unforgettable New Year’s Eve special” with a fixed-price menu in the Supper Club, accompanied by live entertainment featuring Persian singers and belly dancers. The Hilton’s French restaurant, Chez Maurice, offered romantic dinners by candlelight. In the hotel discotheque, DJ John Coulson was on hand to spin the latest pop hits flown in on audiocassette tapes from New York and London. Abba’s “Name of the Game,” “How Deep Is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees, and “We Are the Champions” by Queen were the hot tracks of the winter, and “Mull of Kintyre” by Wings finally toppled Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” after eight straight weeks at the top of the charts. Iranian playlists included disco tracks by popular local stars Darioush, Manouchehr, Giti, Ramesh, and Googoosh. The fun would continue well into the night. After-dinner entertainment ran the gamut in Tehran, where every taste, fancy, and quirk was catered to. In a city where an exotic dancer had recently been paid a staggering $50,000 to disrobe at a private party, nightclub patrons at Club Vanak looked forward to a smorgasbord of “belly dancers, strip teasers, sexy dancers, go-go girls, jugglers and musicians.”
Moviegoers in Tehran had fewer choices over the new year. New foreign movie releases were a rarity in a country that for the past several years had been blacklisted by Hollywood studios because of the Shah’s stubborn refusal to approve an increase in cinema ticket prices. The boycott ended when the government reached a deal to raise prices, but the big studios still insisted that Iranian cinemas first screen a backlog of movies that dated back to the midseventies. The result was a slew of disaster pictures that opened in late 1977 and kept audiences on the edges of their seats, each film emphasizing failure of leadership, loss of control, and public panic. In Towering Inferno (1974), which opened just before Christmas 1977, a group of hapless celebrants were stranded when fire broke out in what was supposed to be the world’s newest and most luxurious skyscraper. In Earthquake (1974), the glamorous, sun-drenched metropolis of Los Angeles was flattened by a powerful temblor and dam collapse. The protagonists in Jaws (1975), which opened in Tehran cinemas in the New Year, kept trying to swim to safety but never quite made it.
Tehranis would have to wait before they could see Saturday Night Fever, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the three blockbuster releases that swept American and European box offices that winter. John Travolta was the biggest movie star in the world and every teenage girl’s crush. The slim pickings on New Year’s Eve in Tehran were the usual fare of obscure horrors, spaghetti Westerns, and dated romances. Over on Old Shemiran Road the Bowling screened The Graduate (1967). Showing at the Ice Palace on Pahlavi Avenue were two movies whose titles eerily portended how most Americans living in Tehran spent their next New Year’s Eve, The Getaway (1972), starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, followed by Peter Cushing’s Now the Screaming Starts (1973). For those planning a quiet night in, National Iranian Radio and Television’s English-language television station cut away from its regular nighttime lineup of Charlie’s Angels, Space 1999, and Shaft to broadcast the evening movie, The Pendulum, a 1969 murder thriller with George Peppard and Jean Seberg with sly political undertones. At the time of its release the American movie critic Roger Ebert had denounced it as “a fascist movie, defending strong authority figures against citizens’ rights.”
Tonight’s big show, of course, was the televised state banquet in honor of the Carters.
* * *
JIMMY CARTER ROSE to deliver his toast shortly after ten o’clock. A hush fell over the dining hall in Niavaran and in private homes and in bars, hotels, and restaurants across Tehran, and indeed around the country, the meal chatter subsided, drinks were set aside, and celebrants gathered around television sets to listen to what the American president had to say. Every word the president said would be parsed and analyzed for some hidden or deeper meaning. Television audiences noticed the anxiety on the Queen’s face. From her seat at the top table, Princess Ashraf also thought she knew what was going on. “I looked at his pale face,” she remembered. “I thought his smile was artificial, his eyes icy—I hoped I could trust him.” “The situation in Iran was already bad,” recalled Elli Antoniades, Queen Farah’s friend since childhood. Farah’s circle regarded Carter with a wariness bordering on distrust. “We were in such a bad mood. We were so suspicious of Carter.”
This president had a habit of laying it on thick with foreign heads of state. Previously, Carter had praised Yugoslavia’s Communist dictator Marshal Josip Broz Tito as “one of the world’s greatest fighters of freedom,” and he had lauded President Hafez Assad of Syria, no one’s idea of a pacifist or diplomat, as a great “peacemaker.” Both leaders ran tough dictatorial regimes. In his banquet speech in Warsaw, the first stop on his trip, Carter had startled his Communist hosts by telling them that their two countries shared similar values. “I wish you’d quit saying how great a friendship you’ve struck with some leader after meeting only briefly,” grumbled the Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson. The press pool cringed when Carter began his remarks describing the Shah’s riot-torn visit to Washington the previous month as “delightful.” There were more raised eyebrows when he offered that he had traveled to Tehran in deference to his wife’s wishes. Carter said he had asked Rosalynn: “‘With whom then would you like to spend New Year’s Eve?’ And she said, ‘Above all others, I think, with the Shah and Empress of Iran.’ So we arranged the trip accordingly to be with you.” Then Carter turned serious. To everyone’s surprise, he lauded the great strides made in Iran during the Shah’s reign. “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” he declared. “This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”
Ambassador Sullivan’s staff, seated at the rear of the banquet hall, looked at each other in astonishment. What on earth was the president doing? For the past year they had been quietly monitoring the rising level of unrest around the country. Jack Shellenberger, the embassy’s head of public affairs, watched the scene unfold, with Carter “throwing away all the material that had been prepared. So like most of these visits by presidents, the mix of words that goes into the final speeches comes from many players,” he recalled. “But I think Carter was in such rapture at being in this palace among the friendly family, the Pahlavis, he felt, well, this guy has got it together and he won’t fall, he’ll survive.” White House speechwriter James Fallows, who crafted the final version of the toast on the drive in from the airport, knew nothing about the loaded history of “island of stability.” But if his goal was to offer the Shah assurance, his penmanship did the trick.
After dinner the two heads of state retired for a private conference with King Hussein of Jordan, who had flown in to discuss the prospects for a Middle East peace deal. The Carters originally intended to withdraw to their suite to see in the New Year but changed their minds after the Queen prevailed on them to stay for a celebratory glass of champagne. The party moved into her library. “I have a happy memory of that evening, which was peaceful, friendly, and warm,” she recalled. On the library balcony, overlooking the floor where the heads of state and their guests danced and chatted, Crown Prince Reza and Princess Farahnaz played the latest disco hits on a record player and practiced their dance moves to applause from the adults. Their father grimaced at the racket. He waved his hands, trying to signal them to turn down the volume, but eventually gave up and let them have their fun. The New Year was greeted with a round of cheers, hugs, and handshakes.
* * *
WHILE JACK SHELLENBERGER sat shaking his head in the Shah’s palace, his daughter Katie Shellenberger and her friends were dancing in the Hilton’s disco before moving on to other venues around town. The American celebrants didn’t notice the stern-faced young man who watched them with disdain from the shadows. “I went to the InterContinental,” said the student revolutionary Ali Hossein. “The discotheque. Alcohol was prevalent. They were against the values of the nation. The Pahlavis did not see any limit for them. They felt they were free to do whatever they liked.”
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING the Pahlavis accompanied the Carters to Mehrebad Airport. As the president climbed the stairs to Air Force One he stopped, turned to the Shah, and dramatically declared, “I wish you were coming with me.” The irony of his farewell remarks did not become apparent for quite some time. After Air Force One took off, the Shah did something that for him was quite out of character. Usually reticent before large crowds, he was buoyed by Carter’s visit and agreed to Ambassador Sullivan’s suggestion that he greet several hundred members of the American community who waited patiently behind a rope line. To the surprise and delight of the crowd, the King and Queen strolled over and began shaking hands. It was a spontaneous gesture and one greatly appreciated by the Americans, who clapped and called out expressions of support. “We admired the Shah for what he was doing for the Iranian people,” said Bruce Vernor, an oil company executive who took photographs while his wife, Pat, greeted the royal couple. “And we liked to say that with the Shahbanou we had the most beautiful head of state in the world!” The Pahlavis left to a round of cheers and applause. The Shah was delighted with the reception. “You Americans are really very nice people,” he complimented the ambassador, who thought the remark unintentionally revealing.
Sharp-eyed readers who picked up their copy of that morning’s Kayhan newspaper might have noticed the teasing headline on page nine: “Period of Trepidation Ahead Says Zodiac Calendar.” According to the Asian zodiac, 1978 was the Year of the Horse. “It may be an occasion for trepidation,” the paper reported. People born in horse years were distinguished by their “energy but are prone to be impatient and emotional, often going too far and creating friction with people around them.” In a horse year, people tended to do whatever they wanted “without being nervous over small details.” It was a time to let loose and not think of the consequences. It so happened that previous horse years in Iran had coincided with great upheavals. They included 1906, which Kayhan omitted to mention was the year of the Constitutional Revolution, when the Qajar Dynasty surrendered to a popular uprising, and also 1930, when “a worldwide economic depression brought widespread bankruptcy in many countries, encouraging the rise of extremist movements.” One “startling prediction” even had it that in 1978 the holy book the Quran would become well known in the United States. Kayhan advised its readers to hold on—this year might be a wild ride.
Internationally syndicated newspaper columnist Gwynne Dyer indulged in the sort of idle but provocative speculation that often fills newspaper copy over the holiday season. He had history on his mind. Dyer reminded his readers that “the past we are condemned to relive (with only the names changed) is a past that included vast surprises. The Black Death, the French Revolution, the rise of Islam, the creation of the Soviet Union: nobody knew those things were coming, and yet they changed practically everyone’s lives.” Revolutions and religious unrest were historical “wild cards” that no one could predict with any certainty. As an example, he cited the Shah of Iran.
A modest example of a present-day wild card is the ‘one bullet regime’ of Iran. The Shah is clever, but he is not bullet-proof. If an assassin should get him (and several have tried) there is no guessing what would happen in Iran. Since the country supplies a large slice of Western Europe’s and Japan’s oil (and, according to foreign sources, almost all of Israel’s oil imports), radical change in Iran would mean crisis not only in the Gulf but much farther afield.
Yet history had a way of pulling surprises. Before she flew out of Iran, celebrity journalist Barbara Walters sat down with the Shah to gauge his views on developments in the Middle East. The previous day, Yasser Arafat had presided over a four-hour military parade in Beirut to mark the Palestine Liberation Organization’s thirteenth anniversary. Before a crowd of eight thousand supporters in the war-torn city’s municipal sports stadium, Arafat denounced National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s recent comment that the Palestine Liberation Organization had “written itself off” for refusing to participate in regional peace talks. “It’s not bye-bye PLO, Mr. Brzezinski,” thundered Arafat. “It’s bye-bye America again and again in the Middle East. Let it sink into Mr Brzezinski’s and even Carter’s brain that America’s entire interests shall be written off rather than the PLO.” Arafat was flanked by top Palestinian commanders and faction leaders including George Habash, leader of the more radical left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “There will never be an alternative except the gun, the gun, the gun!” Arafat told the cheering crowd.
Arafat’s threat to attack U.S. interests in the Middle East held special resonance for Washington’s chief ally in the region. The Shah was Israel’s main oil supplier, President Sadat’s friend, and the most vocal regional supporter of the Egypt-Israel peace talks. No other Muslim leader dared express support for a treaty resolving the conflict between the two states. If the Shah was removed from the scene the U.S. strategic position would be severely weakened and Israel left dangerously exposed. The Shah’s remarks to Barbara Walters suggested that he understood he had been threatened by Arafat and Habash, who ran the terror camps where young Iranian revolutionaries trained. He made it clear that he expected a rough time of it over the next twelve months. “But the destructive, negative elements everywhere are in turmoil,” he told Walters. “Everywhere they are up to some mischief. And somewhere, all the elements of trouble are on the loose and unleashed. So every country should expect those elements to try to foment some trouble.” Iran’s rain catcher saw storm clouds on the horizon.
Hours later, the great primal, subterranean forces the Shah had dedicated his life, his reign, and billions of dollars trying to contain and suppress came unloosed. The tectonic plates that underpinned a millennium of Iranian history began to strain and buckle. For 35 million Iranians, and for the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who made Iran their home, a way of life and an entire world was about to end. Over the next year the choices they made and the decisions made for them would seal their fate. The cleaners at the Hilton Hotel on Pahlavi Avenue had barely mopped the floors and swept up the streamers when the first stirrings of unrest that led to revolution erupted in Iran.
* * *
THE NEXT FEW days were quiet enough.
Across town, the Crown Players’ production of Dick Whittington opened at the Italian Theater on France Avenue, and an open casting call was held for a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. On the resort island of Kish the House of Christian Dior staged a fashion show featuring the latest swimwear. In local news, the head of Tehran’s Criminal Investigation Division, General Farzaneh, reported that the capital remained one of the safest big cities in the world, with crime rates well below those in European and American capitals. But he cautioned that crime was steadily rising in Iran’s metropolitan areas: “The new, mechanized way of life, the migration of the population from rural areas to the congested cities, the sudden picture of wealth and affluence which greets the young and often uneducated people who come to Tehran for the first time, all contribute to the increasing number of thefts and murders in the city.”
The economy rallied. After months of depressing news, Iran registered its biggest gains in oil production in a year, with daily output back at 6.4 million barrels. Crown Prince Reza arrived in Bangkok on the first leg of his three-nation Asia-Pacific tour. From Niavaran, the Shah spoke out in support of wildlife conservation—he condemned “hunting for pleasure” motived by “bloodlust”—and met with a team of international experts advising the government on a long-term plan to transform Iran into a global hub for science and medical research. Iran had already entered the computer age. There were three hundred computers in service in Iran in 1977, demand was growing by 300 percent a year, and the market for business equipment and systems was projected to hit a record figure of $500 million within the next eighteen months. This at a time when only thirteen countries had more than a hundred computers per million of population. Iran Air’s new computerized ticketing center was scheduled to come online in January 1978, at which time the Concorde would start flying American and European jet-setters to Kish.
The Shah announced plans to fly to Aswan to confer with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco on peace talks with Israel, followed by a stop in Riyadh on the way home to brief King Khalid of Saudi Arabia on their progress. He chose not to attend the Rastakhiz Party’s one-day special session held on Wednesday, January 4, at the Aryamehr indoor sports stadium in Tehran. But a statement read out in his behalf called on the ten thousand delegates to combat “subversive intrigues” through “political education” of the masses. Other speakers took up the theme that “red and black reactionaries” were trying to destabilize the country. Prime Minister Amuzegar warned that “a few innocent deceived youths shouting here and there, and breaking windows,” had been manipulated by more experienced foreign instigators. His government, he vowed, would “crush any attempt at anarchy, slavery, disorder and colonization ruthlessly.”
The prime minister’s game of bluff was starting to wear thin. Though in public he liked to talk tough, Amuzegar had already made it clear to Ambassador Sullivan that there would be no crackdown on dissent.
* * *
THE ROOMFUL OF women at Damavand College erupted in laughter.
On Saturday, January 7, 1978, Tehran’s celebrated liberal arts university for women marked its tenth birthday and the forty-second anniversary of the abolition of the veil by royal decree. Damavand College was named after Iran’s highest mountain to symbolize the spirit of endurance and excellence in women’s education. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Associated Architects in the 1960s, the campus grounds were built on a parcel of land donated by the Shah in the hills above northeastern Tehran. Iranian and foreign-born women studied a mixed curriculum that focused on Persian and Western civilization. This morning students were gathered for a special panel discussion to commemorate Reza Shah’s bold decision in 1936 to ban the veil. Mrs. Effat Samiian reminisced about her participation in the first unveiling ceremony. She reminded the audience that American missionaries had done “a great deal to prepare fertile ground for the subsequent emancipation of women.” One former missionary, Miss Jane Doolittle, talked about the conditions that prevailed when she arrived in Persia in 1921: “Iranian women were hidden from society, and prevented from an active life.” She stood beside a student modeling a chador, pointing at it like a museum exhibit, and eliciting laughter from her audience.
The students of Damavand College believed the future belonged to them. In the 1960s and 1970s the legal and civil protections accorded Iranian women were the most progressive in the Muslim world. The Shah granted women the right to vote, enter politics, and own property. The age of marriage was raised and abortion was legalized. Divorces were now handled by the courts and not decided by husbands and the clergy. Laws were passed guaranteeing equal pay and opportunity in the workforce. The civil service allowed women with children under age three to work half days with full benefits. The Shah’s emphasis on promoting higher education paid off: in 1978 women made up a third of all university students and half of all medical school applicants. Women were moving into politics. Mahnaz Afkhami, a thirty-six-year-old graduate of the University of San Francisco, was Iran’s first minister of state for women’s affairs, and there were twenty female members of parliament and four hundred female city councillors. Women were entering corporate boardrooms and the performing arts. Iran Air appointed Minu Ahmadsartip as its deputy managing director, popular singer Aki Banai returned home in the New Year following a triumphant tour of American cities, and Anahid Moradian opened the country’s first hair salon to cater to a male and female clientele. Young women of the middle class dressed in skirts, jeans, and blouses and styled their hair after American celebrities Farrah Fawcett, star of the hit TV show Charlie’s Angels, and ice skater Dorothy Hamill. They studied abroad, drove around town unaccompanied by male relatives, and dated and danced the night away in discotheques in northern Tehran.
Iran was changing. But even as the students at Damavand College celebrated four decades of progress, across town one hundred women marched for the return of the veil, strict segregation of men and women in public places, and the repeal of the 1963 emancipation proclamation. They protested in Isfahan and also in Mashad, where police moved in to arrest several women blocking traffic on Naderi Avenue. But police stood back in Qom when religious students poured from the seminaries to chant antiregime slogans. The voice of the political establishment, the newspaper Kayhan, chastised the protesters as deviants. “Their demonstration was in effect a call to return to the Stone Age, to negate achievements of modern Iranian society, and to deprive half the population of their basic human rights,” declared an editorial. “Had they looked around themselves while shouting their reactionary slogans they would have seen scorn and utter disgust in the eyes of the passersby.”
The following day, when photographs of the event at Damavand appeared in the press, college administrators began receiving anonymous threatening phone calls. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” a school spokesman assured the students. “We cannot turn back to where we were a generation ago.”
* * *
BY THE TIME the students left for home on that chilly Saturday afternoon the fuse of revolt had been lit. Most Tehranis missed the January 7 evening edition of the newspaper Ettelaat, and fewer still bothered to read the mundane headline printed on page seven in small type: “IRAN AND RED-AND-BLACK COLONIALISM.” On closer inspection, however, the article, ostensibly a letter to the editor, consisted of a virulent attack against Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The anonymous author accused the Marja of treachery and fraud. “By his own admission, Ruhollah Khomeini had lived in India and there had relations with the centers of English imperialism. What is clear is that his fame as the chief instigator of the events of 1963 has persisted to this day. Opposed to the [White] Revolution in Iran, he was determined to install a red-and-black imperialism, and unleashed his agents against the land reform, women’s rights and nationalization of the forests, shed the blood of innocent people and showed that even today there are people ready loyally to put themselves at the disposal of conspirators and [foreign] national interests.… Millions of Iranian Muslims will ponder how Iran’s enemies choose their accomplices as need arises, even accomplices dressed in the sacred and honorable cloth of the clergyman.”
The article in Ettelaat, the official response to Khomeini’s fatwa, was the brainchild of the special committee set up a month earlier to devise strategies to discredit the Marja. Asadollah Alam would never have allowed a newspaper to publicly attack a marja, let alone one with Khomeini’s track record of extremism. His replacement, Court Minister Hoveyda, however, saw an opportunity to cause trouble for his successor, Jamshid Amuzegar, whom he blamed for usurping the premiership. Amuzegar lacked experience in crisis management and had no background in dealing with the ulama. Hoveyda’s decision to hand the article to Savak’s General Nasiri with orders to publish was an act of spite more than anything else. “Hoveyda wrote the letter to prove his loyalty and then blamed it on Amuzegar,” said Ardeshir Zahedi. Parviz Sabeti felt sure the article would incite disturbances in Qom. “I told Nasiri,” he recalled, “do not do this unless we are ready to arrest them.”
The two officials were still debating what to do when Minister of Information Dariush Homayoun, in attendance at the Rastakhiz Party’s January 4 plenary, handed a copy of the letter to a reporter from the newspaper Ettelaat. “Homayoun was leaving the conference hall when he gave our reporter the envelope,” said Farhad Massoudi, Ettelaat’s young publisher. “When he saw that the flip of the envelope contained the Court’s seal he took it back, tore off the seal, then handed it back to the reporter.” Massoudi read the letter and decided not to publish. “It was personal and vitriolic, in very poor taste. It accused Khomeini of not being Iranian and implied he was homosexual.” Massoudi had a poor relationship with Homayoun, whom he regarded as arrogant and conceited, and asked his senior editor, Ahmad Shahidy, to make the call to the Ministry of Information. Shahidy told Homayoun the letter was ill-advised and put them all at risk: “If we print this letter they might burn us down.” “If Ettelaat has to burn down, it’s better it be so,” Homayoun retorted and hung up. Massoudi telephoned the prime minister’s office out of desperation. “He was most kind but he knew nothing of the letter. He said: ‘Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you.’” Homayoun called later in the day to inform Shahidy that “though Mr. Massoudi is concerned, the letter must be published.” Fearing trouble from religious fanatics, the staff at Ettelaat tried to minimize the impact by printing the letter in small type beside a large advertisement for machinery.
By the dinner hour on January 7, 1978, copies of the newspaper had been rushed to Qom. No one could remember such a slanderous attack against a marja. “Writing such an article about a brave, pious marja was a strategic mistake,” said religious revolutionary Ali Hossein, who read the paper in Tehran. “No one can degrade a marja. Even the Shah couldn’t do so.” Within two hours, Khomeini’s agents were on the streets of Qom, setting fire to Ettelaat’s newsstands. The next day they marched to the homes of the town’s three most prominent grand ayatollahs—the men responsible for Khomeini’s elevation fifteen years earlier—to demand that they issue public statements condemning the regime and declaring their support for their fellow marja.
* * *
ON THE AFTERNOON of Monday, January 9, while the Shah was in Aswan for talks with President Sadat of Egypt, Queen Farah was en route to Paris for a two-day trip, and the Crown Prince was in Australia, police officers in Qom were set upon by several thousand rioters. The mob tore through the downtown district and attacked and set alight “banks, government offices, girls’ schools, bookshops selling non-religious publications, the homes of officials and the city’s only two restaurants where men and women could dine under the same roof.” By nightfall a crowd of twenty thousand had taken over the streets and for the first time the cry of “Death to the Shah!” was heard in what was to become a familiar chilling refrain over the next year. Khomeini supporters besieged Police Station Number One, set cars alight, and tried to force their way inside. The officers retreated to the rooftop and opened fire on the crowd, killing six people and wounding a dozen others. A thirteen-year-old boy was crushed underfoot in the stampede to escape the gunfire. Order was restored only with the help of army units rushed to the stricken town. Though none knew it at the time, the first shots of revolution had been fired.
The Shah returned to Tehran on Tuesday, January 10. He betrayed no outward signs of anxiety and appeared relaxed at an evening reception for six visiting American senators. He had spent the morning with President Sadat in Aswan, where the two old friends had driven through the streets in an open car basking in the adoration of cheering crowds. His remarks to his guests focused exclusively on the Egypt-Israel peace negotiations. While the senators circulated, Court Minister Hoveyda took aside U.S. embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Jack Miklos for a private chat. Rumors were circulating in Tehran that the army had massacred seventy religious students and dumped their bodies in a salt lake on the edge of Qom. Hoveyda assured Miklos there were only six confirmed casualties and that they had been rioters armed with “stones, iron bars, and wooden staves” who had rampaged through the streets of Qom “smashing windows of shops and destroying premises of [the] Rastakhiz Party headquarters.”
Over the next two weeks scattered outbreaks of violence at universities and strikes in the bazaars were reported in several cities. In Tehran, religious zealots attacked the Arya Cinema on Zahedi Avenue, while further south in Shiraz congregants poured out of a mosque and hurled rocks at police. Undergraduates rioted at Aryamehr University, Aryamehr Technical College, and Tehran University. At Narmak College, six hundred students overwhelmed security guards, broke into the chancellor’s office, and “virtually destroyed the administration building”; over seventy percent of windows on campus were smashed. At Isfahan University, a “volley of rocks broke 60 percent of windows in the faculty of foreign languages. There were no casualties and no class disruption, but university authorities were disconcerted by the level of organization shown and by [the] fact that this is the first time that this faculty has been hit this school year.” The cycle of unrest accelerated sharply over the weekend of January 14–15 with protest marches reported in Mashad, Abadan, Ahwaz, Dezful, and Khorramshahr. Prime Minister Amuzegar’s clumsy response was to stage a large progovernment demonstration of loyalty to the throne on the outskirts of Qom, a highly provocative gesture at a time when city residents were in deep mourning for those killed earlier in the month.
Princess Ashraf Pahlavi watched events unfold with a gnawing sense of anxiety. On the eve of the pro-government rally in Qom she received a call from Mahnaz Afkhami to say that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was having trouble rounding up volunteers to make the trip—Qom was regarded by liberated Iranian women as a no-go area. The Princess phoned Parviz Sabeti to seek reinforcements. “I can provide more,” he assured her. While she was on the phone, Ashraf asked Sabeti his thoughts on the security situation.
“What is going on?” she asked. “[General] Nasiri is stupid. But you are intelligent. What is happening?”
“You had better ask your brother,” answered Sabeti. “He was the one who tied the dog to the stone and set it free.” Sabeti’s point was that the Shah’s policy was doomed to fail: he could not on the one hand expect the security forces to maintain order while insisting they avoid violence. “The way His Majesty is going, Fifteen Khordad will be a picnic. We will have to bring machine guns and tanks into the streets.”
“You dare talk like this!” snapped the Princess, her brother’s most fervent defender. “You people only think of force. To you, killing people is as easy as drinking water.”
“Who wants to kill people?” replied Sabeti. “I don’t want to see us get to a point where we are faced with exactly that situation.”
* * *
IN THE EMBASSY on Roosevelt Avenue, Ambassador Sullivan and his political advisers huddled. They understood that the events of the past week signaled a major escalation of unrest. “I counted the crisis as starting from January 1978,” recalled George Lambrakis. “In the embassy we always counted that as the beginning. We were pretty sure the Shah had ordered the publication of the article in Ettelaat attacking Khomeini. Our best guess was that he was preparing to turn over to his son. Then the question was why. He was getting older, his son was growing up, and maybe at that point someone mentioned an illness. We didn’t know he had cancer. But the French head of intelligence in their embassy believed the Shah was finished.” On January 11, Sullivan cabled Washington that “in most serious incident of this sort for years” five demonstrators had been killed and nine wounded when a crowd attempted to storm a police station “in the religious city of Qom.” There was still confusion as to which clerical faction had been involved in the protests. According to Sullivan, police sources blamed “conservative religious opposition elements (though not specifically to followers of Khomeini or to Islamic Marxists as such).” Ten days later, Sullivan warned there was a very real danger that the regime would lose control and find itself in a confrontation with “fundamentalist religious leaders,” as had happened in 1963.
On February 1, Sullivan sent a follow-up airgram to Washington with the first detailed description of the men orchestrating the unrest. Crucially, he already understood that moderate and extremist groups in Iran were in contact and coordinating a joint strategy. The lull in guerrilla activity over the past year had little to do with Savak’s counterinsurgency techniques and everything to do with a secret deal reached between the National Front and Liberation Movement and the Mujahedin and Fedayeen. The moderates had persuaded the men with guns to pause their operations to give the Americans time to pressure the Shah to cede his powers. Attacks would resume if Carter showed that he was either unable or unwilling to force the Shah to make political concessions. Sullivan also explained that senior religious leaders enjoyed separate ties to the Mujahedin terror group. “At the present time, we do not know how these connections take place, but they have been hinted at second and third hand by a number of individuals who have dealt with the oppositionist movement.” Religious hard-liners favored launching a frontal assault against the Shah’s regime, which they felt sure could be toppled. Their strategy was to provoke a crackdown by the security forces and publicize civilian casualties as a way of stoking public anger. “The loose and fluid religious structure of Iran offers perhaps the only country-wide network for an oppositionist group,” Sullivan advised. “Embassy sources suggest religious groups are talking about joining together for certain demonstrations similar to those which eventually led to confrontation in 1963. Circumstances would appear to be important—if additional incidents involving the religious community, such as firing upon marchers, either occurs or can be generated, religious fervor could be activated to provide the mob manpower for demonstrations.”
But Sullivan’s assessment contained a single devastating flaw when he described Khomeini as “the true leader of the Shia faithful,” a statement that was not only factually incorrect but also theologically impossible. Shiism’s paramount marja was Grand Ayatollah Khoi, who enjoyed the biggest popular following and who resolutely opposed clerical involvement in politics. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari shared Khoi’s dim view of Khomeini’s activism. American ignorance of Shia Islam and Iran’s Shiite hierarchy led Sullivan and his political officers to prematurely confer political legitimacy on the most radical of the marjas and overlook the two men who represented the great moderate center of Shiism.
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IN QOM, GRAND Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari faced a dilemma.
The Marja’s silence in response to the Ettelaat article had provoked charges of cowardice from Khomeini sympathizers who paraded outside his home in drag, waving female undergarments and demanding that he condemn the regime’s use of force to put down the riots. Shariatmadari understood that by staying silent he risked creating a leadership vacuum that Khomeini would be all too ready to fill. The Marja also wanted to send the Shah a message. He believed the Shah had not done enough to curb his relatives’ financial dealings, clamp down on corruption, and restrict foreign cultural influence. He wanted the Shah to declare that he would abide within the strictures of the 1906 constitutional settlement that guaranteed the ulama a role in approving government laws. Clerical frustration extended to more temporal matters and in particular Amuzegar’s austerity budget, which had ended his predecessor Hoveyda’s practice of paying “subsidies” to thousands of mullahs around the country. If the money did not ensure their loyalty to the regime it at least kept them off the streets and in the mosques. The amount involved, an estimated $35 million annually, was hardly worth the political price. “Austerity during liberalization was a disaster,” said Parviz Sabeti. “Cutting the deficit was a disaster. Amuzegar cut the subsidies but the amount [for each mullah] was never much, around 300 tomens. He also cut credit and loans to the bazaaris.” These policies meant that the mullahs and their friends in the bazaars had a shared grievance. “The sudden cut meant that a large number of mullahs no longer had any reason to support the regime,” said journalist Amir Taheri.
With these concerns in mind, Shariatmadari issued a rare public letter condemning the bloodshed in Qom as “un-Islamic and inhumane.” Though he did not mention the Shah by name—the Marja preferred to spare the monarch embarrassment and cast blame instead on his government—his anger was palpable. He invited three foreign correspondents to his home in Qom and explained his position. “The government says we are reactionaries and backward,” he said. “Well, if being backward means we want the constitutional laws to be respected, then we accept that definition.” Shariatmadari warned that if he wanted “he could have ordered all the bazaars and mosques in Iran closed, sending thousands of people into the streets, but that this would only risk more shootings.” His decision to speak out electrified the ulama and shocked public opinion. Many Iranians who until now had ignored the unrest in Qom were suddenly made aware of a looming confrontation between crown and clergy.
Over the winter Reza Ghotbi, Queen Farah’s cousin and the head of Iranian television and radio, drove down to Qom to see Shariatmadari. Ghotbi often fielded complaints from the ayatollahs about television programs such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, which depicted women in the workplace and ran story lines on abortion, homosexuality, and premarital sex. But National Iranian Radio and Television devoted far more resources to religious programming, and Ghotbi’s staff were always careful to consult with clerical experts while filming special projects such as the annual televised reenactments of Shia passion plays. During his trip to Qom, Ghotbi asked his religious hosts to explain what they thought Grand Ayatollah Khomeini meant with his call for an Islamic government. One ayatollah explained to Ghotbi that it would be like a return to the sixteenth century, when the Safavid Dynasty had shared power with the ulama. “The Shah is the son-in-law of the Ayatollah,” he said. “And the Ayatollah is the son-in-law of the Shah.” Shariatmadari added that he had talked to Khomeini about that very issue. He wanted to know if Khomeini meant to establish a dictatorship. He said he had asked Khomeini flat out, “Do you mean that you want to run the state?” Khomeini’s reply made clear that he saw himself as occupying a far more elevated position, that of “supreme leader” or intermediary between God and government. Besides, he told Shariatmadari, he already had someone in mind to run a future Islamic government. He was not interested in a political post. “No,” he said, he had no such ambition for himself. “I have Musa Sadr in mind as prime minister.”
Reza Ghotbi was familiar with Musa Sadr. “I had heard about his work in Lebanon. One of his cousins was a colleague of mine. I was aware that Musa Sadr was in conflict with our ambassador in Beirut and that he had traveled to Cairo to talk about his problem with our ambassador there. He wanted to assure His Majesty that he was not against him.”
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FIVE YEARS EARLIER, Musa Sadr had enjoyed a warm rapport with the Shah and Court Minister Alam. Since then, however, relations had cooled to the point where the Shah refused to receive the Imam or listen to his requests for financial assistance.
Lebanon’s descent into anarchy in the early 1970s had made the country a magnet for extremist groups. The Shah was especially concerned because of the number of Iranian revolutionaries who traveled to the Bekaa Valley to be trained as bomb throwers, while in the capital, Beirut, zealots copied and distributed Khomeini’s speeches and propaganda tracts in a safe house. These materials were then smuggled into Iran and stored in a warehouse in the capital’s southern suburbs. In the south of Lebanon, as conditions deteriorated, Musa Sadr felt compelled to form a loyalist militia, the Amal, led by Mustafa Chamran, an anti-Shah exile who had trained in electrical engineering at the University of Berkeley California, completed a PhD, and went to work in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Chamran built the Amal militia into a formidable fighting force that drew recruits from disaffected Lebanese Shia youth but also from the hundreds of Iranian dissidents who came to Lebanon to learn how to overthrow the Pahlavi monarchy. Outraged by what he perceived to be disloyalty, the Shah ordered that Musa Sadr be stripped of his Iranian passport. As far as the Shah was concerned, the Imam could swim with the sharks. Musa Sadr appealed to the Shah to understand the delicacy of his position and explained to Iranian officials who contacted him that his primary responsibility was to the Shia of Lebanon and not to the Pahlavi state. He bitterly complained that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mansur Qadar, a Savak general and confidant of General Nasiri, was trying to frame him as an anti-Shah revolutionary.
Musa Sadr’s estrangement from his patron in Tehran left him dangerously isolated and vulnerable to men such as Abolhassan Banisadr and Ahmad Khomeini, who suspected he did not share their extremist agenda. They were deeply angered when he blamed their ally Yasser Arafat for provoking Israeli military action in and around his stronghold of Tyre. His next heresy was to ally himself with Syria and support President Hafez Assad’s decision to send troops into Lebanon to try to dampen the civil war and prevent the Palestinian leader from setting up his own puppet state inside Lebanon. Musa Sadr received death threats and after evacuating his wife and children to Paris spent his days on the run, shuttling between safe houses in the Lebanese capital. Despite Musa Sadr’s open breach with Arafat, Khomeini retained a soft spot for him. He entertained the notion of appointing his former pupil to serve as the first prime minister of an Islamic republic. Talk like this disturbed his son Ahmad, a fanatic who nurtured his own political ambitions. “Ahmad was someone thinking in terms of power,” recalled Abolhassan Banisadr. “He had no scruples in terms of religion, clerics or whatever. His wife was Musa Sadr’s niece but he was not someone who necessarily liked Musa Sadr.”
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OUTWARDLY AT LEAST, the streets of Tehran appeared calm in late January, though the mood of complacency tended to rise with the elevation. “Many Iranians appear to have ceased to believe newspaper reports of religious incidents and regard counter-demonstrations as government inspired,” observed the U.S. embassy. But others, acting on tip-offs from friends and family members in high places, suspected there was something wrong in the palace. Since the summer they had purchased residences in Europe and North America. Now they began quietly moving family members out of the country to safety.
Then, at six thirty on the morning of Thursday, January 19, an explosion tore through Tehran’s Bowling Recreation Club, a popular hangout spot for American teenagers that housed a cinema, indoor pool, skating rink, and bowling alley. The fire on Old Shemiran Road “raged for hours,” reported Kayhan, “and brought frightened householders in the neighborhood to the scene.” Eight days later a second explosion and fire tore through the three-story Sabouri furniture store on Pahlavi Avenue. The inferno on Friday, January 27, broke out at six forty-one in the morning, raged for four hours, and almost detonated a nearby gasoline station. Both fires were reported in the local press without comment. The authorities worried that if the public learned the truth—Islamic sabotage squads were at work targeting businesses owned by Jews and members of the Baha’i faith, regarded by the Shia as apostates—there would be panic. Knowledgeable Tehranis read between the lines anyway. There had already been a run on Iran’s largest private commercial bank, Bank Saderat, whose three thousand branches also made it the most accessible for depositors. They didn’t need the government to tell them that Bank Saderat was owned by a Baha’i, or that Khomeini had ordered his followers to suddenly withdraw their savings in an attempt to collapse the banking system.
On that same Friday evening, at the end of another long week of suspicion and rumor, strollers leaving Tehran mosques after evening prayers claimed they saw an unidentified flying object approach northeast Tehran and the hills around Niavaran from the direction of “the southern end of the city.” In the words of one eyewitness, the object was “shining brightly, regularly changed its colors and flew for about fifteen minutes over the area in a revolving manner before it suddenly gained speed and disappeared.”
For the past two years, UFO sightings and paranormal disturbances had escalated in direct proportion to the intensity of Iran’s Islamic revival. Two weeks earlier, on the same day that Ettelaat published the article attacking Khomeini, police officers were called to a house on Vanak Square in Tehran to investigate alarming reports of a mysterious intruder. Twelve-year-old housemaid Zari, who spoke as if in a trance, described her friendship with an “extraterrestrial being” named “Honar” who stood over two meters tall and whose arms and legs were “longer than an ordinary human being [with a] body [that] was covered with something like a black fur coat.… Some strange light reflects off the eyes of this creature and this light causes the attention of the onlooker to be drawn on it rather than to any other part of its body.” Her employers said they too had experienced “strange and unexpected things connected to an ‘outer space creature’” and felt the intruder’s presence. Furniture was moved around rooms, the radio turned itself on and off, the refrigerator was unplugged, and trays of food were missing. Police officers confirmed that fingerprints found in the house were “not those of any human being.”
The most notorious incident involving UFOs had occurred fifteen months earlier, and had drawn the Shah’s close attention. At 11 o’clock on the evening of September 18, 1976, the control tower at Mehrebad Airport received four telephone calls from residents of Tehran’s Shemiran district who reported seeing bright lights and a fast moving object in the sky overhead. The unidentified aircraft was picked up on radar and two F-4 fighter jets were scrambled from Hamadan air base to investigate. Air force generals suspected a Russian intruder, possibly to test the readiness of Iran’s aerial defenses. The pilots radioed ground control with detailed descriptions of a large cylindrical object with flashing lights that released a smaller orb, which flew toward and around them—no mean feat considering the pilots were flying at almost the speed of sound—and started circling them. One of the pilots turned back to base. Fearing an attack, his colleague, Lieutenant Parviz Jafari, made an attempt to fire a sidewinder missile at the intruder when he reported the electronics in his cockpit suddenly failed, shutting down all radar and navigation equipment. After regaining power he returned to Hamadan for a debriefing that drew the attention of CIA investigators. He told them he had seen a second small orbit plummet into the earth north of Shemiran. The American briefing on the incident was sent to President Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The Shah’s reaction to the mystery intruder in the night sky over Tehran was telling. He knew the intruder hadn’t been a Russian aircraft testing Iran’s aerial defenses. “The Russians weren’t coming over Iran anymore,” said Lieutenant General Mohammad Hossein Mehrmand, the Hamadan base commander. “Our new F-14 jets flew with Phoenix missiles that could reach Russian aircraft even if they were flying at a higher altitude. The Shah knew this. And Jafari was a good pilot.” Five days later, the Shah flew down to Hamadan to learn more. “He listened carefully to the pilots for thirty to thirty-five minutes,” said General Mehrmand. “He didn’t ask any questions.” At the end of the presentation the Shah made one of his typically oblique observations. “Yes,” he said, “for sure there was something out there. But it did not come from the human hand.” He paused before adding, “Maybe it came from the other side.” Though the events of September 18, 1976, were never fully explained, astronomers did observe that on the same evening a meteor shower rained debris over a broad arc of territory that stretched from Iran as far west as Morocco.
There was no easy explanation for the monster of Vanak Square and the sightings of bright lights circling over Tehran. Throughout human history, however, such events have often been interpreted as precursors to the fall of kings and the collapse of empires. The faithful saw the flying lights over Niavaran as an omen that Allah was on their side and that Islam would triumph.