Evil has come to our great house; I weep
That all our foes are wolves, and we are sheep.
—THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS
I am fighting for my son.
—QUEEN FARAH
The Shah refused to accept—indeed, he could not accept—that martial law and liberalization were incompatible. He astonished observers when he insisted there was no need to postpone national elections planned for the summer of 1979, then announced new legislation to guarantee freedom of the press and assembly. By now the Imperial Court was in full retreat before the forces of Islam. Another round of concessions followed. The Shah replaced Amir Abbas Hoveyda as his Imperial Court minister with a former foreign minister, Ali Qoli Ardalan, and announced a code of conduct that banned members of the Imperial Family from involvement in state affairs and business deals related to government. He was so anxious to buy peace that he even offered to scrap his beloved social reforms. “We have always thought that our major decisions [for reform] were taken in accordance with the spirit of Islam. If it can be proven that they are against those principles, this is something that can be discussed.”
The Shah may have seen these concessions as tactical but to friend and foe alike they amounted to a straightforward policy of appeasement. Prime Minister Sharif-Emami took his cue and proceeded to dismantle the entire edifice of the Pahlavi state on national television. He allowed broadcasters to film live debates from the floor of the Majles, where deputies accused him of graft and incompetence and demanded his resignation. To satisfy the complaints of shopkeepers, he shortened curfew hours. Anxious to placate the ulama, the prime minister quietly suppressed the military investigation into Jaleh Square that revealed evidence of Palestinian involvement. He likewise made no attempt to prosecute several religious fanatics arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Rex Cinema arson. The blizzard of concessions included lifting all restrictions on hajj pilgrimages, freezing electricity and water prices, and extending the national health insurance plan. The prisons became revolving doors, and Sharif-Emami boasted that in the space of two weeks the police had arrested 1,106 people and released 981 of them. Three hundred political prisoners were released in a single day to make room for former government officials and prominent businessmen rounded up as the regime began sacrificing its own to buy time and placate the mobs.
The Shah issued explicit instructions to General Oveissi that there should be no repeat of Jaleh Square. “I don’t want any Iranian to even have a bloody nose,” he ordered. If the troops had to fire in self-defense or clear the streets, he insisted they first fire rounds in the air and only in extreme situations aim at protesters’ legs. “I overheard the Shah say to Oveissi, ‘No, no, no one should be hurt,’” recalled one of the Shah’s counselors. “I told the Shah, ‘We are in a revolution, Your Majesty. People will die.’” Oveissi and the generals felt that the Shah distrusted them and wanted two very different things, ordering them to prevent an insurrection with one arm tied behind their back. “What kind of general was I?” asked Oveissi. “The army had to smile to the people. They shot in the air.” But the Shah was insistent. Again and again, courtiers overheard him reminding this general or that colonel to hold fire. “How many times have I said to you?” he told one officer. “No blood from the nose of an Iranian.”
The Imperial Family spent September ensconced at Saadabad Palace. Before they returned to their winter residence, Colonel Djahinbini and his security detail swept Niavaran and the offices of both the King and Queen for electronic bugging devices. The escalation of unrest in Tehran over the summer had presented Djahinbini with a new and unnerving set of challenges, not least of which was Khomeini’s public call for the Shah’s murder. The colonel was aware that members of the Imperial household staff emulated Khomeini as their marja: the women among them had started covering their hair and the men were becoming more withdrawn. “There was a lot of pressure amongst the staff who tended to be religious,” said Kambiz Atabai, who managed the household. “They were torn between Khomeini and the family. I could feel and I knew that some of the staff were struggling with their loyalties.” In this fraught atmosphere no one could say for sure where the line between religious observance and political fanaticism began and where it ended. Djahinbini also worried that foreign powers were trying to take advantage of the unrest in the streets to step up efforts to infiltrate the palace and eavesdrop on conversations. Starting in the early autumn “we checked His Majesty’s office regularly. We were suspicious. There were so many rumors outside the palace and I was not sure where the information was coming from.” The Shah and Queen Farah assumed they were under surveillance and made sure to never discuss sensitive matters over the phone. Despite the advent of Xerox machines and the telex, the Shah’s preference was to always use back channels and personal envoys to ferry handwritten messages to his interlocutors. His wife followed his example and told her friends to assume that if they phoned the palace their conversations were likely being recorded.
The Queen agreed with her husband’s decision to avoid bloodshed at all costs. She also made it clear that her main priority was to stay strong and secure the throne for her son. “She is the one with guts,” Hoveyda told Britain’s ambassador Parsons. Hoveyda stayed in touch with Farah over the phone, though after his dismissal he was careful not to venture near the palace. In an interview with Paris Match magazine shortly after Jaleh Square, Farah said she was “gripped by a deep sadness” at the tragic turn of events. “I think our country is at a crossroads,” she said. “Iran has reached one of the most important pages of its history, one of the most important in the past 2,500 years. We are entering a new era. This requires that we gather all our forces to fight and work. As for me, I consider that my first priority is to protect my mental and physical health in order to devote myself to my country, my people and to democracy to which we all aspire.”
Farah made no mention of her husband—they both knew he was finished—and focused instead on the Crown Prince and the prospect of her regency. “I am fighting for my son,” she said. “The most essential quality he can have is faith. Faith in his country, his people, faith in the task—he has to perform for the good of all. And he will have to remain close to his people. This has never been easy for those who have such heavy responsibilities.”
“All observers are struck by one fact,” her interviewer pointed out. “While many criticisms are directed at the government and against the Shah, none are aimed at you.”
Farah tapped the top of her desk. “Touch wood,” she murmured. “I am trying to do everything I can to find a solution to the problems. A whole set of issues have arisen at the same time in our country. We are going through a crisis of growth that is the inevitable price of progress. It is a crisis of culture, society, politics, and spirituality. Iran can be compared to a man of vigor who has been taken ill with a fever. My hope is that the sudden pressure will decrease so we can see more clearly the path to follow.” Her greatest source of strength and pride, she said, was “to have won the hearts of a large part of our population.” Farah was trying to control her fear and apprehension of the future. “I force myself to overcome my anxiety, to forget my fear. Each mother is preoccupied with the future of her children. This is what I do, too, for my son.”
All hope was not lost. The Pahlavis believed they still had one last arrow left in their quiver: they still had Musa Sadr, whose charisma and moderation posed the greatest threat to Khomeini from within the ranks of the senior clergy.
* * *
ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, a Lebanese radio station broadcast a short news item informing listeners that Imam Musa Sadr “had been kidnapped in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.” President Elias Sarkis ordered an immediate inquiry and dispatched a team of investigators to Tripoli, Rome, and Paris where the Imam’s wife and children had fled to escape the civil war. Interpol issued a worldwide bulletin asking for information about his whereabouts, and governments in the region mobilized their resources. Colonel Gadhafi’s government insisted that Musa Sadr had left for Rome on August 31, a claim swiftly refuted by Italian authorities, who checked “hotels, boarding houses and the homes of Lebanese in Rome.” Rumors surfaced in the Arab press suggesting that Musa Sadr had secretly returned to Iran to join the fight against the Shah or that he had been kidnapped by Savak. “Certainly he is no friend of the Shah,” commented Britain’s Guardian. The stories were plants and his supporters were quick to rubbish them. “We strongly believe the Imam is still in Libya,” declared Lebanon’s Shiite Council. “If he really departed from Libya, as Libyan officials claim, then we demand conclusive proof.”
Musa Sadr’s boyhood friend Dr. Ali Kani was in Tabriz trying to marshal support for the Shah with Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Hossein Tabatabai, one of the most prominent Shia clerics, when the King’s valet telephoned him at ten thirty at night. “According to Your Majesty,” said the caller, “you should return immediately to Tehran.” With the curfew in force, Kani telephoned Azerbaijan’s governor-general “to send someone to protect me if I ventured outside. I asked him to send me two officers to bring me to the hotel where my pilot was located. We drove to the airport with a military escort.”
Early the next morning, Kani drove to Niavaran where he found the Shah “very upset.” The Shah got straight to the point: “I ask you to save your friend.”
“Majesty, which friend?”
“Your friend Musa Sadr.”
Kani felt “quite astonished. I was speechless.” What was going on?
The Shah gravely looked at him: “You know, we have discovered that Musa Sadr was not a traitor.”
Kani couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I am awfully sorry, Your Majesty, are you joking or pulling my leg?” For the past several years, whenever the Shah had mentioned the Imam in Ali Kani’s presence he had described him as a traitor. But now Kani listened in stunned disbelief as the Shah explained that Musa Sadr had not been seen in two weeks and had missed a secret meeting with a palace envoy set for September 5–7 in West Germany. The dates eerily coincided with the crucial end of Ramadan protest marches and street unrest.
The Shah impressed on Ali Kani the importance he placed on locating and rescuing Musa Sadr. “A plane is at your disposal,” he instructed. “If to save him you need money, we are okay—there is no limit on the price. And I have arranged a meeting for you with Crown Prince Fahd [of Saudi Arabia]. After Fahd you will see King Hussein [of Jordan]. And then [President] Sadat is waiting for you in Cairo.”
In Qom, Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari called reporters to his home and read out the text of a telegram he had sent to Colonel Gadhafi demanding an explanation: “Islam holds the Libyan government responsible for his disappearance and demands information on his well-being.”
* * *
THE HAMMER BLOWS kept coming. Iranians were still absorbing the shock of Jaleh Square and the imposition of martial law when the northeast of the country was struck by a devastating earthquake. The ground broke open at the dinner hour on Saturday, September 16, when a temblor measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale tore through Iran’s Great Salt Desert. Worst hit was the oasis town of Tabas and forty surrounding villages. “Tabas is a mound of rubble,” reported an Iran radio correspondent. “There is nothing standing except the palm trees. All houses have collapsed, burying thousands of people.” Picturesque Tabas, the “Gem of Kavir,” was one of Iran’s most important historic settlements. The King and Queen agreed that he would stay in Tehran to manage the political crisis while she flew to the scene of the disaster, but Prime Minister Sharif-Emami was hesitant to approve Farah’s trip. “Mr. Sharif-Emami did not know how I would be received; he doubted how the population would react,” she recalled. “The government had in fact lost direction. It was bombarded with differing opinions from politicians, clerics, and the army.”
The Queen ignored the prime minister’s protests and flew to the disaster zone in the back of a C-130 transport plane. Arriving to scenes of utter devastation, she bore the brunt of angry survivors who demanded faster action from the government. Farah also had to contend with yet another false rumor spread by the mullahs, this one blaming her husband for causing the earthquake by reportedly allowing the American military to conduct a nuclear test in the desert. Once again, Khomeini’s men were spreading lies and conspiracy theories. “Dig out the dead!” voices in the crowd called out. “Dig out the dead!” She drove through the wrecked streets of Tabas in an open car to survey the damage and a young man hurled himself forward. “Don’t go sightseeing!” he accused her. “Go pull out the bodies of my family!” Onlookers reported that the Queen “sat motionless, looking as if she might burst into tears at any moment.” Later, she wept, stunned by the scale of human suffering and distraught at her treatment.
Two days later it was her husband’s turn, but as had happened at other critical times in his reign the Shah’s mere presence was enough to turn the crowds. “They gave him the sort of treatment that in the West is normally reserved for rock stars,” reported one thoroughly impressed British correspondent who accompanied him. Hundreds pressed around him cheering, “Shahanshah!” Survivors broke through the security cordon and threw themselves at his feet, kissing his shoes and hands and beseeching his help. “I do not want anything from you my dear father,” wept one woman who had lost her child. “I lost everything I had. But please enlarge the photograph of my eighteen-year-old son Khodabaksh.” The most touching scene involved a twelve-year-old boy who had lost his parents and family. He pushed his way through the crowd and begged the Shah to help him continue his studies. “I’ve always been the top student in my class,” he earnestly explained and pulled out his report cards to prove it. The Shah gravely shook his hand, quietly listened to his story, and turning to Khorassan governor-general Seraj Hejazi instructed that the boy be given a scholarship to complete his studies. He asked the authorities to compile a list of all children orphaned by the disaster so they could continue with their schooling. He turned to address the crowd, promising to do his utmost to rebuild their town and passing on the condolences of his son Reza, who was at pilot training school in Texas.
The Shah returned from Tabas to learn that Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari had publicly declared that he would not negotiate with the Imperial Court or the government over his demand that they move quickly to implement the 1906 Constitution, which guaranteed the ulama veto power over parliamentary legislation. “There is nothing to talk about,” he told a small assembly of foreign correspondents who made the trek to Qom. “The government knows our views and our demands. Our demands are simply stated. We want a national government for the nation.” He refused to either endorse or oppose the overthrow of the monarchy. “History and the Iranian people alone, not I, will decide. There is fire in the hearts of the people.”
Foreign observers interpreted Shariatmadari’s threat as a sign that the ulama were united in their opposition to the Shah. But Khomeini despised the 1906 Constitution as a form of liberal mongrelism and had already threatened Shariatmadari for defending it. By declaring that the Constitution was nonnegotiable, Shariatmadari was trying to stay ahead of the crowds while signaling the Shah that there was still time to reach a settlement.
* * *
SENIOR ARMY OFFICERS were distraught that their men were under orders to avoid the use of force even though they faced near-constant harassment in the streets. The troops also made a convenient target for professionally trained terrorists. In Tabriz on Friday morning, September 15, three men wearing military uniforms opened fire on an army unit in the Shams Tabrizi district. In the ensuing hour-long gun battle six soldiers, one civilian, and two gunmen were killed. Several civilians were wounded and rushed to area hospitals in the city. The attackers were remarkably confident and brazen. According to eyewitness reports, “after the initial ambush, the terrorists took up position on the corners of Shams Tabrizi and Seqatoleslam Avenues and continued to fire at the patrol.”
During this unsettled period, Imperial Court official Kambiz Atabai and his good friend General Manuchehr Khosrodad paid a visit to General Hossein Fardust. Khosrodad was worried about army morale and suggested to Kambiz that they “go and see Fardust for a talk.” Atabai did not want to join him. Like many others at court, he considered Fardust to be “not a pleasant man. He used to be invited to all the private parties at the palace. He would speak with very few people. People tended to avoid socializing with him. He had an aura of menace about him and no charisma. He kept to himself.” Fardust’s behavior over the past twelve months had already raised eyebrows. He no longer held regular audiences with the Shah and the two men corresponded only by briefcase though no one, not even the Queen, knew why. “They did not have face-to-face meetings,” Atabai recalled. “This was unusual.”
Atabai and Khosrodad arrived at Fardust’s office at about five in the afternoon. For the next four hours, Fardust subjected the two younger men to a lecture on the Shah’s faults. He said he had disrespected the Constitution and tolerated corruption for too many years. “I’ve given all the reports [on corruption] to the Shah,” he told them, “but it’s too late, too late. He cannot hide under the umbrella of the Constitution.” Fardust dismissed Sharif-Emami as “the boy.” “I have all these files on corruption and I have given them to [Minister of the Interior] General Gharabaghi and said, ‘Give them to the boy.’”
Atabai and Khosrodad were shocked by what they heard. “Because when Fardust spoke it was like the Shah spoke. He had a lot of influence with the other generals. We didn’t go to the Shah because we knew that if we told him he would call Fardust while we were in the room and say, ‘Is it true that you said these things…’ and he would have never believed them.”
* * *
ON A STILL warm night in September several men in plainclothes crept quietly through the back streets of Qom until they made their way to the home of Ayatollah Kashani. Their rapping at the door drew the attention of Ali Hossein, who served as the Ayatollah’s aide, courier, and organizer in the religious underground. One of the men introduced himself as a general and his friends as midranking officers in the Imperial Army. He asked if they could come inside and talk to Kashani in private. “I was allowed to stay,” said Hossein, who witnessed the remarkable exchange that followed.
The men told their story. Following Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration of a fatwa in August calling on army officers to desert, the officers had formed their own revolutionary cell. “We have left [the army] but our friends are still there and they have access to guns and they are under our supervision. What should we do? Should we stay and provide weapons for the revolutionary people or leave?”
Kashani urged them to return to their base. “Leave,” he told them. “We have enough weapons now.”
“We are ready to join the armed groups,” they replied.
“We do not need you yet,” said Kashani.
The men explained, “The nation spent too much money on us to train. We want to fight for the nation.”
“You will still be martyrs, you are on the right path. We have members of the armed forces in our groups.”
The officers returned to the army and began carrying out a sabotage operation. They quietly disobeyed orders and caused the maximum disruption possible to martial law ordinances. They stockpiled weapons and gathered recruits to prepare for the final offensive against the monarchy. Hossein recalled that there were others in government and the military “who had relations with the revolutionary people. We had people inside the army and Savak before the revolution. They were against the Shah and they provided intelligence to the revolutionary cells.”
The Imperial Iranian Army was a central pillar of the Pahlavi state. The decision by the officers to commit treason against their commander in chief was the most tangible sign yet that the regime had started to implode. They realized that Jaleh Square had sullied their reputation and compromised their integrity in the eyes of many Iranians, who now viewed them as an occupying force rather than as defenders of the realm.
* * *
ALI KANI LISTENED as Saudi Crown Prince Fahd told him what he thought had happened to Musa Sadr in Libya. “Gadhafi arrested him,” he explained. “For the sake of [PLO leader] Arafat.” The Saudis concluded that Arafat had appealed to Gadhafi to eliminate Musa Sadr because he was hurting the Palestinian cause in Lebanon.
From Riyadh, Kani flew to Jordan, where King Hussein told him the same thing. His final stop on his regional tour was to Egypt. President Anwar Sadat had wrapped up the Camp David peace talks with a historic peace deal with Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin. Sadat asked Kani to meet him in Alexandria instead of Cairo. Kani explained “what His Majesty the King of Iran would like to know” about the strange disappearance of Musa Sadr. Did His Excellency have any information?
“You know, Gadhafi is a madman, a criminal, a foolish man,” Sadat told his Iranian guest. “That is why we have intelligence in Libya. My agents sent me a secret telegram: ‘Gadhafi has killed Musa Sadr.’ Yesterday, the chief of [Great Britain’s] MI6 visited me for two hours and he told me the same thing.”
On hearing this, Kani grasped his head and lurched forward in his chair.
“What is the matter with you?” Sadat asked with sympathy.
“Since childhood I have loved Musa Sadr like a brother,” Kani exclaimed.
“I am awfully sorry to give you such bad news,” said Sadat. “And you tell my brother in Tehran that unfortunately Musa Sadr no longer exists.” The president added the horrific detail that Gadhafi had placed Musa Sadr’s body in a box, sealed it in concrete, and dropped it from a helicopter into the Mediterranean.
Ali Kani now had the grim task of returning to Tehran to convey the news of Musa Sadr’s death to the Shah, who was anxiously awaiting his report.
When Kani arrived at Niavaran he was ushered straight into the Shah’s presence. “When I returned and relayed the news to His Majesty he was very touched,” Kani remembered. “He was very, very upset. He sat in his chair for ten minutes.”
The Shah was bereft. He had looked to the Imam as his last and best hope for mobilizing the moderate ulama and their followers against the extremist minority who espoused Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih and a religious takeover of the state. Grand Ayatollahs Shariatmadari and Khoi had also counted on Musa Sadr to return to Iran, enter the fray, and address public concerns about the need to reconcile faith with modernity. Now Musa Sadr was dead, and the Shah’s hope for a moderate religious bloc against Khomeini’s power grab collapsed. He faced the deluge alone.
The Shah always operated at two levels, the public and the private, and his next move was characteristic of a ruler whose life had been spent in a veil of intrigue, suspicion, and mistrust. Though in private he accepted that Musa Sadr was dead, to the Iranian media he expressed concern for the cleric’s whereabouts and announced he was sending an envoy, Fereydoun Movassaghi, to the region to meet with the king of Jordan and the president of Syria. The Custodian of the Shia Faith explained that he had “every right to interfere in this question as the Imam is an Iranian citizen and the spiritual leader of a million Lebanese Muslims Shiites.” The Shah was well aware that Khomeini’s agents were behind the smear that he was responsible for Musa Sadr’s disappearance. By sending Movassaghi to the region he hoped to reassure the ulama in Qom that he was doing everything possible to find Musa Sadr. He also hoped to flush out from the woodwork anyone who might know something about the exact circumstances of Musa Sadr’s kidnap and murder.
Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari refused to accept that Musa Sadr was dead. “We are convinced Gadhafi is holding Imam Sadr,” an unnamed “clergy source” presumed to be Iran’s senior marja told reporters on September 22. He said he believed Musa Sadr was being held captive in a prison outside Tripoli and added that the behavior of Yasser Arafat was suspect. Investigators from Qom were sent to Libya and Italy to join the hunt.
* * *
IN THE AFTERMATH of Jaleh Square, Carter administration officials scrambled to assess the Shah’s prospects for survival and build relations with the men trying to depose him. Remarkably, White House officials were still in the dark about Ambassador Sullivan’s aggressive yearlong effort to cultivate Mehdi Bazargan and other senior figures in the National Front and Liberation Movement of Iran. The Shah, who was aware of the ambassador’s overtures, became convinced that the White House was involved in a conspiracy to oust him. Bureaucratic dysfunction extended to intelligence sharing and analysis. Carter’s National Security Council was unaware of CIA intelligence that documented the flow of Palestinian and Libyan money and arms to Khomeini. Though Khomeini’s anti-American and anti-Jewish tirades were a matter of public record, Sullivan’s embassy made no effort to obtain copies of the audiocassettes that were for sale on street corners and in the main bazaar. U.S. officials had still not initiated a study of the role of religion in the unrest or how the mosques and marjas had historically acted as vehicles for protest and change in Iran.
Carter, Secretary of State Vance, and National Security Adviser Brzezinski still remained focused on the Camp David peace accords. They were presumably assured by the latest State Department intelligence estimate that concluded the Pahlavi regime “has a better than even chance of surviving the present difficulties, and the Shah will probably be able to maintain his position through the early 1980s.”
Into the decision-making vacuum stepped lower-tier officials such as Henry Precht, the State Department’s Iran desk officer who harbored a visceral dislike for the Shah and the Pahlavi regime. Precht made contact with Ibrahim Yazdi, a Khomeini loyalist, who raised funds, organized anti-Shah student protests, and published human rights propaganda from his medical practice in Texas. Precht’s contempt for the Shah influenced the way he drafted reports and even the talking points Carter relied on during his September 8 telephone conversation with the Shah. Though Precht later explained that his actions were motivated by the hope for a “peaceful accommodation between the Shah and his opponents,” he conceded that at the time he “did not have a real sense of Khomeini. We knew who Khomeini was. We knew he’d been strongly anti-Shah, but knew nothing about his views.” He knew even less about Yazdi. “We didn’t really know anything about him. I don’t think we knew Yazdi was a US citizen. We had no idea what would happen or who would replace the Shah. We didn’t know the Shah was desperately ill. We did no analysis of how the older National Front and Liberation Movement leaders would fill the vacuum. My impression at that time was that Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to set up a secular government, so the front group would be Bazargan, Yazdi, Ghotzbadegh and the clerics would be in the background.” Precht believed the successor regime to the Pahlavis would be leftist and nationalist but not overtly Islamic.
U.S. officials were developing policy based on little more than hunches, imperfect intelligence, and their own personal prejudices and grudges. There was especially acute distrust between the State Department and Sullivan’s embassy. Officials in Washington complained that diplomats in Tehran were not providing them with accurate reports. Meanwhile, Sullivan’s political counselors suspected Henry Precht’s intentions. George Lambrakis complained that Precht “may have taken my reporting and embroidered it,” and he wondered why key information was not passed from the Iran desk to Gary Sick at the White House. Precht, for his part, considered Lambrakis “astute” but said he “wasn’t impressed” with the quality of John Stempel’s political reporting. John Stempel recalled that Secretary Vance “was really pissed off with my reporting” but he saved his biggest criticism for Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, whom he described as a “little creepy son of a bitch.” Still, everyone could agree with Lambrakis’s assessment of the CIA: “They were of no help at all.”
The Shah and his officials were puzzled and alarmed by American behavior. At the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, October 3, Foreign Minister Amir Khosrow Afshar complained to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that rumors were circulating in Tehran “of U.S. support for the Iranian opposition. He noted that since the U.S. embassy maintained contacts with the National Front and [former Prime Minister Ali] Amini, there were those who believed the embassy was supporting the opposition.”
Vance and his aides finally admitted that U.S. diplomats “did have occasional low-level conversations with certain individuals associated with the opposition, but this did not imply support and it was conducted very discreetly. They were unaware of any contact with Amini.”
Afshar warned of “the danger that such meetings might be misinterpreted.”
Vance assured the minister that “it was clearly not US policy to support the Shah’s opposition and asked if there was anything further we could do to demonstrate support for Iran or to be helpful in these difficult circumstances.” The secretary conceded to Afshar that based on his “limited information … the degree of organization in recent Iranian demonstrations indicated to us some organizing hand, possibly the Soviets, had played a part.”
The Shah’s accusations of betrayal so appalled U.S. officials back in Washington that they decided to have their ally evaluated for evidence of emotional problems and possibly a mental disorder. Three years earlier the CIA had concluded that the Shah’s refusal to bend on oil prices was probably related to feelings of sexual inadequacy and an inferiority complex toward his father. Now they wondered if his reluctance to call out the army had similar psychosexual roots. Henry Precht informed Embassy Tehran that the CIA’s Dr. Jerrold Post, MD, planned to update the agency’s psychological profile of the Shah and begin a new study of Crown Prince Reza. Post’s task was to answer six key questions. First, were the Shah’s “depressive episodes ever so severe as to significantly interfere with his leadership? Did they seem disproportionate to the circumstances or were they rather appropriate discouragement or frustration in the face of severe political problems? What happens to his decision-making at these times—does he ever become paralyzed with indecision, tend to delegate to others decisions he might otherwise make himself?” Second, how did he “pull himself out of these downs”?
Third, the CIA wanted to learn more about Queen Farah’s influence “and the degree to which he relies on her.” Fourth, the Shah had talked about eventually transferring power to his son. Did he believe he was slipping behind schedule for the handover? Fifth, did he expect external military support, presumably from the United States, “during this period of internal unrest”? Sixth, the Shah’s plans to liberalize Iran “have been well delineated for many years” yet he still complained about U.S. pressure to reform: “Please discuss your views of the imbalance between the Shah’s own concepts he hopes to implement and reluctant compliance to external pressure.”
While the Americans dissected the Shah’s childhood and undermined each other, the situation in Iran took an ominous turn for the worse. In the lead-up to the forty-day Rex Cinema mourning observances a rash of strikes erupted in the southern oil fields.
* * *
THE SHAH HAD predicted that martial law would only push opposition to his regime underground, leading to terrorism, strikes, and civil disobedience. While Khomeini’s followers held back to avoid provoking the army, their putative allies in the Communist Tudeh Party took the lead in organizing strikes designed to force concessions and cripple the economy. On September 24, oil workers in Khuzestan Province walked off the job, demanding higher pay. Drilling operations were suspended, and the workshop at the main Abadan oil refinery was shut down. Strikes quickly spread to the banking and telecommunication sectors.
The strikers were also reacting to reports that the Iraqi government, acting at the behest of Tehran, had placed Grand Ayatollah Khomeini under house arrest. Saddam Hussein had his own reasons for trying to neutralize the Marja, whose crusade to collapse the Pahlavi regime was spreading fear and hope throughout a region riven by religious, sectarian, and ethnic rivalries. Khomeini had emerged as the face of an Islamic resurgence, and young Shia and Sunni alike responded with fervor to his call for a single Islamic state to replace socialist republics, military dictatorships, and conservative monarchies. The Iraqis relented on September 25 in response to a plea from the Shah to lift house arrest but Khomeini refused to accept new rules that placed restrictions on his ability to engage in politics and issue public proclamations. He preferred to leave Iraq but stay in the region and tried to move across the border to Kuwait. Nervous Kuwait authorities blocked his entry and he remained in legal limbo. The drama at the Iraq-Kuwait border plunged his followers in Iran into a frenzy. He returned to Najaf while Abolhassan Banisadr and Sadegh Ghotzbadegh applied for temporary visas for entry into France, where they were based.
Anxious to stop the Khuzestan strike before it led to a shutdown of the entire oil sector, Sharif-Emami’s government approved higher salaries and subsidies for workers in the oil, banking, and telecommunication sectors. These concessions inspired a wave of copycat strikes that shut down hospitals, high schools, the postal service, steel plants, and the civil service. “In the spirit of accommodation, the government has speedily given in to almost all economic demands with the result that wages have virtually doubled in many areas and more civil servants are going on strike to get similar benefits,” the U.S. embassy reported. “The wage increases to civil servants will likely be followed by increases to employees of private companies.” The strategy of the Sharif-Emami government “is to negotiate quietly with the bloc of moderate religious leaders and opposition politicians and meanwhile contain the disturbances in the hope that such a deal will isolate troublemakers who come from more extremist groups. By attempting to placate various segments of the nation with the quick fix—such as the large pay raises, the ill-considered pieces of legislation, etc.—the Government of Iran has unwittingly contributed to stirring up a number of other hornets’ nests.”
Encouraged by the regime’s surrender to labor, and aware that public anger over Rex Cinema and Jaleh Square was still running high, on Sunday, October 1, Khomeini’s agents unleashed a new wave of attacks and riots in the cities of Kermanshah, Hamadan, and Daroud and six other towns not covered by the martial law ordinance. By now street marches in cities such as Dezful numbered in the tens of thousands. After months of sitting on the sidelines the Iranian public was stirring but not in the direction the government or the Shah hoped. The strikes had even brought middle-class professionals out onto the streets. This time, emboldened by the experience, their mobilization threatened to collapse another central pillar of support for the Pahlavi regime.
If the Shah was to survive he would have to rally his supporters like President Charles de Gaulle of France, who had faced down a popular revolt in 1968. De Gaulle had appealed to French patriotism and against the odds managed to turn the tide. The Shah’s appearances in recent days at Tabas and Mashad, and the Queen’s forays into southern Tehran and the provinces, suggested the Pahlavis could still draw on a deep wellspring of support from key groups, including the military, moderate ulama, middle- and upper-middle-class conservatives, farmers, factory workers, and millions of poorer observant Iranians who did not subscribe to Khomeini’s fundamentalist view of Islam and Sharia law. Many liberals and leftists who otherwise opposed the monarchy now trembled at the prospect of rule under the mullahs. If the Shah intended to mobilize these disparate groups he would first have to give them a reason to stay and fight. The message he sent at the state opening of the new parliamentary session on Friday, October 6, was not what they wanted to hear. He continued to insist that more and not less liberalization was the answer to unrest. His own supporters interpreted the speech as a sign of surrender, while intellectuals, students, and the left sneered that the Shah was simply trying to placate the crowds before he launched a bloody crackdown to save his throne. “Whatever the regime said, people believed the opposite,” said Ali Hossein. “We saw liberalization as weakness.”
The Shah’s speech failed to draw the sting. Clashes erupted the next day in the Caspian towns of Babol and Amol, where protesters set fires, attacked banks and public buildings, and battled police and the army. Shots were fired and several people were killed, among them a woman who tried to offer shelter to students fleeing the police. Thoroughly dejected by events, the Shah hinted to his advisers that he was thinking about leaving the country for a while to “recuperate.” They had heard the same talk before, in 1953. “I became aware in the second week of October,” said Reza Ghotbi. “I went to see [Minister of State for Executive Affairs] Manuchehr Azmun and he said somehow that the King is going to leave, or he suggested maybe if the King left we can bring calm to the country. That afternoon I went to the court to see if the King can receive me for a few minutes. And he did. I told him there was a rumor he was leaving, or a suggestion that if he did it would bring calm. ‘Sire, I just met [so-and-so] who told me Your Majesty has probably decided to leave the country. People like me are ready to take up arms to defend you. But if you are not here, I don’t know how many of us will defend this building. If you leave it will be the end of Iran. People will defend you but not the government.’”
“It’s interesting you say that,” replied the Shah, “because just before you General Azhari was here and he said the same thing.”
Ghotbi interpreted his response to mean that “he will not leave the country in chaos, but he will leave the country when the chaos has ended. Maybe he was trying to comfort me. I think he had given thought that he would leave if he couldn’t calm the country. I don’t think he had plans at that time to abdicate. He was disillusioned but still engaged.”
Lebanon’s ambassador Khalil al-Khalil resigned his post. He had long since concluded that the Shah’s reluctance to use force meant the Pahlavi Dynasty was finished. Before leaving he paid one final visit to the Shah, at Saadabad. “The Shah hardly spoke,” he said. “When I said I hope things would get better he only smiled.”
* * *
ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, Ambassador William Sullivan sent an urgent classified telegram to Washington warning that Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his entourage were likely to apply for visas to enter the United States. Two days earlier the Marja had flown to Paris with his son Ahmad after a humiliating twenty-four hours spent in limbo on Iraq’s border with Kuwait, where they were denied entry. Thanks to the quick thinking of Abolhassan Banisadr, who lived in Paris, Khomeini secured a three-month visa to enter France. But Khomeini’s advisers apparently had their eyes on another destination. “Source with good access to religious circles tells us that a number of people around Ayatollah Khomeini have been urging him to go to U.S. as a way of publicizing opposition cause where it will do even more good than in Paris,” said Sullivan. “One reason Khomeini has gone to Paris (apart from presence of many Iranian opposition representatives) is said to be because French government has been ‘hard’ on Iranian students there. Khomeini is to try to influence parliamentarians and other prominent Frenchmen to go easier on students.”
Khomeini spent his first few days in Paris living in Banisadr’s apartment before he moved to a more spacious rented home in the suburb of Neauphle-le-Château. Banisadr and two colleagues, the voluble Sadegh Ghotzbadegh, who maintained relations with Gadhafi, Arafat, and the armed groups, and Ibrahim Yazdi, the Houston-based fund-raiser and student organizer, assumed the role of campaign advisers. They screened Khomeini’s visitors, handled media requests for interviews, and made sure their “candidate” stayed “on message.” The talk of moving to New York was set aside as hundreds of news reporters from around the world and thousands of admirers converged on Khomeini’s château. On French soil the Marja, who had lingered in exile for fourteen years, became an international celebrity.
Westerners were fascinated with the mysterious old man, who appeared like a mirage out of the Arabian desert with his flowing beard and black eyes to regale them with tales of the bestial Pahlavis. News reporters hung on Khomeini’s every word, though as Banisadr later freely admitted very few of them were actually his own. In his first press interview, Khomeini spoke at length about his idea to turn Iran into a Muslim theocracy and administer Sharia justice. The Frenchman interviewing Khomeini did not speak Persian, and Banisadr deliberately mistranslated to avoid a scandal. When the reporter left he advised Khomeini that “if you don’t want to become a permanent exile you have to forget about your book. He accepted that. The proof is what he said in Paris.” Khomeini was already an expert dissembler, and he agreed to avoid controversial subjects and follow the talking points provided by Banisadr’s committee of public relations experts, which emphasized democracy, elections, and women’s rights. When Banisadr asked him, “What is an Islamic republic?” Khomeini carefully replied, “It will be like the French republic.” Remarks like this delighted American and European intellectuals who acclaimed Khomeini as an enlightened revolutionary in the tradition of George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi.
While Khomeini settled into his new surroundings in Paris, Banisadr was curious to learn more about Musa Sadr’s fate. He phoned Yasser Arafat, and the PLO chief provided him with a new twist on the mystery. According to Arafat, Gadhafi had told him that during their meeting in Tripoli Musa Sadr became so upset during their conversation that he threatened to leave. Gadhafi said he left the room and ordered his security guards to “calm him down” or “do whatever it takes to get him to stop doing whatever he is doing. His idea was that they either bribe him or scare him. But his intelligence people took this as an order to kill him.”
When Gadhafi returned he asked after Musa Sadr. His men told him, “He’s gone.”
“You mean he’s left?” asked Gadhafi. “He’s gone?”
“No, we killed him,” they answered.
According to the version of events propagated by Arafat, the murder of Musa Sadr had been Gadhafi’s fault, a terrible mistake, and the result of a simple miscommunication.