There is nothing I or anyone else can do about it.
—THE SHAH
I have the feeling there is no hope anymore.
—QUEEN FARAH
The tempo of unrest picked up again in mid-October with strikes closing schools, the Aryamehr steel mill in Isfahan, the Behshahr industrial complex, and the Sarcheshmeh copper works. Large crowds gathered to challenge martial law. Mujahedin gunmen attacked the Iraqi consulate in the port city of Khorramshahr, in apparent retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s decision to expel Khomeini. Tehran’s northern hills began emptying out and every day the classified pages in daily newspapers were filled with property listings and fire sales. By late October, capital worth $50 million was leaving Iran each day, a total of $3 billion since Jaleh Square, and the social season consisted of one maudlin farewell party after another as old friends and familiar faces took their leave. In a single week the ambassadors of Austria, Algeria, Japan, and Pakistan departed. Envoys from the Nordic countries stayed on, but sent out their wives and children. The departure of popular television host Richard Mayhew Smith, whose Thursday afternoon program Window on Iran had entertained and enlightened for many years, drew a big crowd that included the British and New Zealand ambassadors. Mayhew Smith put on a brave face, blaming his decision to leave on a contractual dispute with his employer and declaring before a skeptical audience that he wouldn’t “rule out returning one day.” There were emotional scenes at the farewell reception for Jean-Claude Andrieux, the well-liked general manager of the Hilton Hotel. “Thank heavens we’re leaving at four in the morning,” said his wife, Therese, “otherwise my husband just wouldn’t be able to face his colleagues without tears.” Longtime Austrian resident Carl Hohenegger was more forthright at his farewell: “Iran isn’t the Iran it used to be.”
Fearing the collapse of martial law, a shadowy group of military officers and government officials considered scotching Operation Kach in favor of a full-scale coup that would send the Shah, Queen Farah, and their children out of the country and into permanent exile. Their provisional military government then would lead the nation into elections scheduled for 1979. Rather than tolerate an Islamist state, they also decided that if Khomeini’s bid for power was successful they would pull the army back to Abadan in the south and if need be let mobs burn Tehran to the ground. The generals would form a rebel military government, seize the southern oil fields to cut fuel supplies and revenues to the capital, and from there fight their way north and launch an assault against Tehran—they preferred civil war to an Islamic state. That these scenarios were under discussion in mid-October showed the level of fear and anxiety within the senior ranks of the armed forces. The panic extended to Qom, where moderate clerics predicted a bloodbath if Khomeini ever returned to Iran. They knew him, they knew his ambitions, and they knew what he was capable of if he ever gained power.
Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi began shuttling back and forth between Washington and Tehran in an attempt to rally the royalist cause. Late one night he drove down to Qom for a secret rendezvous with Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, arriving at about two in the morning to evade Khomeini’s agents, who had placed the Marja under surveillance. Shariatmadari was beside himself with worry. “He was nervous and scared of his surroundings,” recalled Zahedi. Moderate clerics were subjected to physical assaults and threats from gangs of young Islamist storm troopers. Zahedi told Shariatmadari he needed his help—the Shah was talking about leaving Iran. “Please call the Shah and say, ‘Don’t leave,’” he pleaded. The next day Shariatmadari phoned the palace and begged the Shah not to leave. Zahedi also reached out to Grand Ayatollah Khoi in Najaf, who sent him a gold ring to give to the Shah with the message, “Have courage.”
Shariatmadari urged rebellious oil workers to ignore Khomeini’s summons to strike and stay on the job. Unsure which marja to follow, the workers sent a delegation to Qom. Shariatmadari repeated his injunction for the men to remain at their posts. From there they went to the home of Ayatollah Kashani, where they were let in by Ali Hossein. “They asked about the strike and their duty and should they continue,” he said. “It was a very important strike. The Shah could not export [oil]. Khomeini had also ordered people not to pay their power and water bills. They wanted to know Khomeini’s opinion about the strike. Was it compulsory to strike or not? Shariatmadari had told the workers it was forbidden to continue and the strike must stop. Now they wanted to know Khomeini’s view.”
Ayatollah Kashani opened his remarks by lauding Shariatmadari as a great marja. Then he asked the workers, “Who is the leader of the movement in Iran?”
They responded, “Imam Khomeini.”
Kashani asked them a second question. “If there is a movement and there is some effort related to that movement, should you ask the leader or the one who is not the leader? You made a mistake. Shariatmadari is not the leader. You should not refer to him. He has no role. Therefore, the real authority in this struggle is Ayatollah Khomeini and I am going to convey his message to the laborers and engineers: ‘It is your compulsory duty to continue the strike. And after a while you will become victorious.’” The delegation left and relayed Kashani’s message to the striking oil workers. Iranian oil production collapsed by two thirds in the last week of October to less than two million barrels per day, a daily loss of $60 million in oil revenues. “Iran’s oil supplies are the regime’s jugular vein,” observed a senior Western diplomat. “To cut these supplies is to cut the Shah’s throat.”
* * *
WITH HIS KINGDOM in flames, his people in open revolt or headed for the doors, and his generals agitating for a putsch, the Shah saw only a series of trapdoors that led to the basement. On Thursday, October 19, he declared before an audience of senior parliamentarians that he had decided to pave the way for “a natural transfer of power” back to the legislative branch—Iran would continue with or without his hand at the helm. His remarks read like a valedictory and the end of an era. “God willing, our history will never have a finish,” he declared in somber tones. “Iran will be everlasting, as long as there is a world.”
At Niavaran, the Shah’s intimates watched the Shah walk the length of his office, playing with his hair, lost in thought. “I would walk one step behind him, always on his left,” recalled Reza Ghotbi. “I remember he turned back, his eyebrows down, and said, ‘I’m not a Suharto. A king cannot kill his nation.’” He accepted his fate and hinted at his future intentions during a small private dinner in late October. “The mood was somber,” said Maryam Ansary. “It was not the joking, teasing, fun times we used to have.” Her brother had recently been injured in a car accident in Milan and she told the Shah she planned to spend three weeks in Italy to help him recover. She was taken aback by his reaction to this news. “Good,” he responded. “It is better that you leave now.” The dinner table conversation turned to the grim subject of unrest. “Everyone was giving advice,” she said. Their bickering drew an unusually sharp response from the top of the table. “Stop it,” the Shah interrupted them. “You know something? It’s like when you go to the casino. Your number comes up and you’re a winner. For fifteen years everything I picked up turned to gold. And now every time I pick up gold it turns to shit. It’s the way life is. There is nothing I or anyone else can do about it.” His companions were stunned into silence.
Since the end of the summer the Shah had sent his extended family out of the country. Only he remained behind with the Queen, their three youngest children, and Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk. Prince Gholam Reza’s wife, Princess Manigeh, received permission to return for a few days to collect some personal items and check on the family home. “I went back alone in October just to make sure the house was in order and to bring out winter clothes,” she said. “In that period I felt that things were not normal. There was a lot of tension and you could feel that. I went to the court and had the chance to visit His Majesty. You could read on his face that he was worried for the country. His Majesty told me that we have to stay outside Iran for the time being.” The Princess instructed her husband’s staff to temporarily close his office. “I just let them know that we do not know when we will back.” She packed suitcases of clothes for the children but left her jewels behind in a safe. Only her husband knew the safe combination and it still hadn’t occurred to them that their exile might be permanent. The Princess was so sure they would return she even brought back their summer clothes. “We could never ever believe that events would take this direction and that we could never go back,” she said. “I did not bring our photo albums. We left everything behind, even our memories.”
The Shah’s refusal to save himself meant that ministers, generals, and courtiers directed their petitions to Queen Farah. They bombarded her with ideas to pass on to her husband—he should order a crackdown, hold a rally, make a televised appeal to the nation admitting his mistakes and beg for forgiveness. The dutiful intermediary usually came back with the same answer. “The prime minister was coming to me, and the generals, and others,” she recalled. “It was confusing. They wanted us to act stronger because we still had the people with us.” Despite their past disagreements on policy matters, husband and wife were united in their belief that violence was not the answer. Unlike the Shah, though, Farah refused to accept that they were finished. She wanted to keep fighting—for Reza, for the dynasty, for the White Revolution, and for the millions of people counting on them, not least the women of Iran who faced subjugation at the hands of the mullahs. She could not stand by and watch the destruction of a half-century legacy of progressive social policy.
The Queen refused to be a prisoner in the palace and held her head high during public appearances. She made a highly publicized trip to open the new training center for nursing and health workers housed at the Society for the Protection of Children, where she was cheered and embraced by the excited students. Farah returned to the palace, pulled the doors closed behind her, and collapsed. “I have the feeling there is no hope anymore,” she wrote in a notebook. The Pahlavis threw a small bash to celebrate Farah’s fortieth birthday, but their attempt to lift everyone’s spirits failed. Elli Antoniades described the atmosphere as “very sad. And after that the social life ended.”
In the downstairs dining room where the King and Queen took their evening meals, a piece of paper was found on the table. The handwritten scrawl read, “Death to the Shah.”
* * *
THE SHAH HAD lost all faith in the technocrats who had been at his side since 1963. He blamed them for covering up mistakes and excesses and lying to protect their prerogatives and privileges—the Persian court mentality had always been to tell the king what he wanted to hear. Ambassador William Sullivan cabled Washington that “the Shah feels himself without any clear plan for the immediate future and without any reliable Iranian advisers from whom he can get objective reactions.” For that reason, the Shah began holding regular consultations with the American and British envoys. He held Sullivan and Anthony Parsons in only marginally higher esteem but assumed—naively, as it turned out—that they at least understood the threats he faced from the far right and the far left. He recalled the diplomatic intrigues that had surrounded his accession to the throne in 1941 and recognized that Allied support would be crucial if and when his son took the throne.
Neither envoy was suited to the role of Imperial confidant. Parsons was an inveterate gossip, “the favorite source of all the American correspondents in Tehran,” recalled Chicago Tribune reporter Ray Moseley, and the ubiquitous “senior Western diplomat” whose patronizing assessments of the Shah convinced officials in Washington and London that Iran’s king needed a night nurse and a glass of hot milk to calm his nerves. Indeed, Parsons’s self-appointed role as resident sage of the revolution would have been laughable if it weren’t so tragic—with the exception of Sullivan, the Briton was one of the most misinformed diplomats in Iran. Foreign correspondents who made the trek to the British chancellery and spotted the “elderly man in rumpled clothing, hair uncombed, tending rose bushes,” and usually took him for the gardener, couldn’t have found a more highly placed source—or one less knowledgeable about the country where he served.
Sullivan was more problematic. The Shah knew that U.S. embassy officials were holding talks with his opponents inside Iran. But he was unaware that the CIA had successfully intercepted the telephone lines at Neauphle-le-Château, where Khomeini and his supporters were ensconced. The Americans recorded and read incoming and outgoing calls placed from the house, then sent transcripts of the conversations to officials who managed Iranian affairs in the White House, the State Department, and the embassy in Tehran. “We were able to intercept some messages,” confirmed Henry Precht, who read them. “They were not intercepted from his residence but from his phone calls,” confirmed Charlie Naas. “We had the means to do it. We would discuss them with Sullivan.” The ambassador did not share what U.S. intelligence knew about Khomeini with the Shah, and he felt free to offer advice to the Shah even though he knew the CIA had also intercepted Queen Farah’s private phone line, sending the transcripts back to the White House, where they were closely studied. They didn’t learn much—like Khomeini, Farah knew better than to reveal her true intentions over the phone.
Sullivan and Parsons encouraged the Shah to oppose the generals who pressed him to replace Sharif-Emami with military rule. The ambassadors suspected the officers were unduly pessimistic, “feeding the Shah the darkest possible view of the current situation,” and that military rule would only “create worst [sic] pressures which might lead to a real explosion.” Sullivan was so opposed to the idea of a military government that he even lobbied Washington against sending over a team of U.S. specialists to train the Iranian Army in riot control and the peaceful dispersal of large crowds of protesters: “He did not want to give the Iranian military the idea that we wanted to help them have the capability of maintaining themselves in power bloodlessly if they took over.” Sullivan’s policy meant that young Iranian Army recruits were forced to confront large groups of rioters, some infiltrated by professional agitators, with only rifles and live rounds at their disposal, making bloodshed more, not less, likely.
* * *
MARTIAL LAW DISINTEGRATED at the end of the month. On October 26 the Shah’s formal birthday salaam went ahead in Golestan Palace’s Hall of Mirrors, with thousands of spectators lining the streets to watch the Pahlavi motorcade with motorcycle outriders pull up. “There was not the least demonstration—no cheers, no jeers, no whistles—only a heavy silence, both going and coming back,” observed Hushang Nahavandi. “This reflected the view mainly taken by the public—amazement and expectancy. People were waiting for an end to events and the winner of the confrontation.” The Shah “arrived ashen-faced.… He was expecting, perhaps, signs of hostility but not this silence—these questioning looks turned towards him.” Before entering the hall he drank a cup of sweet tea. Chief of Protocol Afshar whispered in his ear, “Sire, no one must notice your sadness, especially today—you must inspire confidence.” “You’re right,” he answered. Forcing a smile, he entered the room on his wife’s arm.
Away from the capital, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Khorramabad waving black banners and chanting, “Allah Akbar!” (“God is Great!”). They gave chase to two men they suspected were undercover police agents and stoned one to death. In Isfahan a terrorist died when his bomb prematurely exploded. Mobs launched an assault on the governor’s office in Kermanshah. Five people were shot and killed in a small town outside Hamadan. In Mashad an estimated one hundred thousand demonstrators marched through the streets and in Gorgan a crowd of thirty thousand chanted, “Victory to Khomeini!” and “Victory to Sharia!” Government buildings in Soussangerd were stormed. Rioters burned the center of town in Rasht. In Kermanshah an unveiled woman was pulled from her car, which was then set alight. In the southern city of Jahrom a rooftop sniper took aim at a jeep traveling through town and assassinated the local police chief. The authorities were shocked when the arrested gunman revealed himself to be one of their own soldiers.
Unrest flared in Tehran on Sunday, October 29, when gangs of youths took over city streets, overturning vehicles and building flaming barricades. “The entire capital was plagued by demonstrations and sporadic clashes between students and troops and police in east and west Tehran,” reported Kayhan. Barricades were thrown up on Shahreza and Shah Avenues to block the progress of army convoys. Thousands of student protesters charged up Sabah Avenue until troops dispersed them with water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Army helicopters hovered overhead to direct tanks and armored cars to the scene, and troops fired live rounds in the air to drive the crowds back. Traffic came to a halt and motorists were teargassed where they sat in their cars. Sullivan and Parsons were returning to Shemiran after meeting with the prime minister when the Briton’s Rolls-Royce came to a halt on a side street. Fifty yards up the road men with clubs and pipes began overturning and setting fire to automobiles. Parsons’s driver spun the big car around—no easy maneuver on a crowded side street—and “we shot off down a small alley pursued by some of the club wielders.” The ambassadors and their plainclothes police escorts took shelter in a bank, where the manager offered them tea and sympathy.
The Shah’s strategy of appeasement had ended in a rout. “The more you feed an alligator, the bigger and hungrier it becomes,” observed a senior Iranian military officer. The unrest continued even after the security forces and civil service were purged of hard-liners, an action that effectively decapitated the regime’s security and intelligence apparatus. Dozens of high-ranking regime officials, including Parviz Sabeti, were tipped off in advance and fled Iran before they could be jailed. The prison gates were flung open and 1,451 political prisoners, including Communists, convicted terrorists, and religious fanatics, were pardoned and set free. Twenty-five years earlier, Deputy Court Minister Abolfath Atabai had accompanied the Shah and Queen Soraya into exile. He recalled those dark days as he watched the Shah struggle with the decision to use force against his people. He took aside the generals and begged them to proceed with their coup. “My boss cannot make up his mind,” he told them. “Go ahead and take action. Put tanks around the palace, cut the phone lines so you won’t have anyone in the palace telling you not to act, and do what you need to do to save the country.”
On the evening of the last long day of October, the Shah reviewed the deteriorating situation with the two ambassadors. He told Sullivan and Parsons that his generals were losing patience. Earlier in the day the army had marched into Abadan and seized control of the oil refinery and other oil installations along the southern coast. The Shah, said Sullivan, was “sober but controlled and occasionally displaying a rather macabre touch of humor.” He repeated his opposition to a military government, which “would at best be a quick fix and in the long run no solution at all.” He said he was considering which opposition leaders would make suitable ministers in a coalition government. Almost as an aside, he explained that he expected former prime minister Hoveyda and former Savak chief Nasiri “to go to jail” to satisfy the mobs. It was now that his bleak humor came to the fore. “Finally, the Shah said life was cruel,” Sullivan jotted down in his notebook. “His loyal prime minister was at that very moment courageously pleading his heart out in the Majles to obtain a vote of confidence, while he sat plotting with the British and American ambassadors to replace him.”
On November 1, the day all domestic air travel was grounded by strike action at the airports, and with tens of thousands protesting in the streets of the capital, the Shah intimated to Sullivan and Parsons for the first time that he might leave the country. His efforts to cajole the leaders of the National Front to join a coalition government had come to naught. He refused their condition to hold a referendum on the future of the monarchy, telling the ambassadors that he would rather “leave the country than submit to that.” He knew the Imperial regime “was melting away daily and time was running out; therefore, he had to look at alternatives.” The generals were starting to take measures into their own hands. In recent days the palace had been presented with a petition signed by three hundred senior officers urging the monarch to call out the army. The Shah told the ambassadors that he was aware that “many people, including his military probably considered him cowardly or indecisive for failing to take the military course of action. He wondered how history would judge him.” Sullivan and Parsons assured him that his stand “was viewed as very prudent and courageous” in Washington and London (Sullivan wrote “Hip Hip Hooray” in the margin of his meeting notes).
The Shah and the ambassadors were still in conference when a call came through from his ambassador to Washington. Ardeshir Zahedi was rumored to be behind a series of recent pro-royalist vigilante-style attacks in Kerman and other provincial towns. In the most dramatic episode, several hundred Baluchi horsemen had stormed the center of Paveh during an opposition rally and killed eleven people. Zahedi was telling friends in Washington that “his advice to the Shah is to bring out progovernment groups to demonstrate and if necessary to do battle even if that means civil war.” The Shah would have none of it. Speaking in front of the ambassadors, he “cut [Zahedi] off short with a statement that this was not 1953 and was not even the same situation that existed two weeks ago when [you were] here.” He hung up the phone and Sullivan said that he agreed with the Shah’s view that “in 1953 the bazaaris and mullahs led mobs in support of the monarchy. In 1978 they are leading mobs against the monarchy. Zahedi cannot switch the bazaaris and mullahs off today. Recourse to mob violence under present conditions would only assist the polarization between the Shah and Khomeini supporters.”
Sullivan returned to Roosevelt Avenue and cabled Washington for instructions. He said he needed to know what he should tell the Shah if, as expected, the monarch “reported that none of his efforts or a political situation will work and that he needs to decide whether to abdicate and turn the government over to the military or to impose military government under his continuing rule.” He expected that the Shah would inform him that he would stay on as ruler “only if the US and UK say that they will continue to support him.”
The ambassador’s telegram caused consternation in the White House, which had consistently underestimated the scale of unrest in Iran. On the evening of November 2, President Carter’s national security team met to consider their options. They expressed astonishment at the scale and speed of disturbances and decided that Moscow must be involved in trying to upset the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. “The fact is there was some external support for the unrest,” said National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Yet U.S. officials were surprised only because they had not been closely following events in Iran over the past year. They lacked any real understanding of Islam and the Shah’s preference to avoid bloodshed.
On Friday, November 3, Brzezinski thought he saw his silver lining. “Good news!” he informed President Carter. According to a CIA assessment, issued in August, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.” The intelligence agency reported,
There is dissatisfaction with the Shah’s tight control of the political process, but this does not at present threaten the government. Perhaps most important, the military, far from being a hotbed of conspiracies, supports the monarchy. Those who are in opposition, both the violent and the nonviolent, do not have the ability to be more than troublesome in any transition to a new regime.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Saturday, November 4, all hell broke loose.
Shortly before noon several thousand student protesters gathered outside the main gates of the University of Tehran. A similar disturbance the day before had led to clashes with police. “There were students in Western sports jackets, young women in traditional robes and a contingent of streetwise toughs from the bazaars,” reported one observer. This time the students faced off against five hundred troops “with fixed bayonets.” The students hurled insults, rocks, and bottles and chanted, “Down with the Shah!” and “Death to the Shah!” The senior army officer ordered them to break into smaller groups, and when they refused to comply tried to disperse them using a water cannon, tear gas, and by firing live rounds over their heads. “They are only firing in the air!” the demonstrators jeered. They set fire to vehicles and used the flaming debris to build a barricade. But when they tried to pull down a statue of the Shah the troops lost patience and sprayed the crowd with automatic weapons fire, killing at least five students.
The students stampeded back onto the grounds of the campus, then poured out onto Shahreza and Kakh Avenues waving blood-soaked shirts and rampaging through the central business district. Banks, restaurants, shops, liquor stores, and buses and trucks were set alight. At the InterContinental Hotel hundreds of tourists and businessmen took refuge in the lobby or watched from upper-floor windows as the mob “surged onto the hotel grounds, armed with fists and pockets of rocks taken from the gravel trucks. Within minutes they had broken every ground floor window, invaded the coffee shop where they overturned most of its tables and hurled decorative lamps and vases down the hallway, and demolished the shops that line the ornate arcade.” The tourists ran for the stairwells and elevators while security guards formed a chain to unravel high-pressure hoses and “washed the invaders back through the windows.” After trashing the hotel’s interior the rioters fled the scene “as if by signal. Most of them evaporated down side streets, like troops dispersing after an ambush, but a rear guard of about 50 paused and in a remarkably short time overturned and set fire to three automobiles blocking their retreat.”
Iranians in their hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demand Khomeini’s return and the Shah’s departure. Two hundred thousand marched in Isfahan, two hundred thousand in Qom, two hundred thousand in Ahwaz, twenty thousand in Dezful, and ten thousand in Borazjan. There were vast turnouts in Mashad, Abadan, Bushehr, and a score of other cities and towns. Troops panicked and fired into crowds in Kohdasht in Lorestan Province, killing two people. The town of Paveh remained cut off from the outside world, surrounded by the same vigilante militia that had terrorized residents the week before, denied food and medical supplies. Staff at the Post, Telephones, and Telegraph Department staged a wildcat strike. Iran Air pilots refused to fly. Industrial action shut down the port city of Bandar Abbas. Three dozen oil tankers idled in the waters off Kharg Island, unable to load their fuel shipments. Following several bomb threats, guests at Tehran’s Hilton Hotel were served dinner and drinks in their rooms.
Late on Saturday afternoon, the Shah invited Sullivan and Parsons to Niavaran, where they “spent a long prayer session” reviewing the crisis. Sullivan told the Shah that the White House was prepared to support a military government. In response, the Shah “wondered why a military government would be successful. He cited the day’s events to demonstrate his own doubts about the military’s capability to restore law and order.” The troops had stood firm against the demonstrators in the morning, though he “did not yet know if there were any fatalities, but he did know that hit and run demonstrations had then broken out all over town beyond the capability of troops to control.” He added that while he appreciated Carter’s support “he could not see what the President would actually do in tangible terms … the situation was vastly different from 1953 when US assistance had been helpful.” His only real hope was for a civilian government that would “accept the Constitution, i.e., the monarchy, and on the other hand have the support of Shariatmadari and the moderate clergy.” The problem was that for a coalition to work “Shariatmadari and the National Front would have to break with Khomeini and come out publicly for a negotiated settlement. If the moderates surrendered to Khomeini’s dictates he would likely call for a jihad and there would be a bloodbath. Even some of the military would take their obligations to Islam ahead of their obligations to the Shah.”
* * *
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, dawned overcast with light drizzle and temperatures predicted in the high fifties by the afternoon. There was nothing at first to suggest that Tehran’s simmering unrest would come to a boil, or that by evening residents would be standing on their rooftops watching the town burn from one end to the other. In the morning, staff at the Sheraton Hotel prepared the banquet hall for the annual St. Andrew’s Ball, and in Shemiran the Niavaran Cultural Center opened its doors for the visiting Shadow Theater of China. Despite the recent surge of anti-Semitism, the Goldis Cinema was screening Fiddler on the Roof. Ambassador William Sullivan started his morning with a visit to Iran’s beleaguered prime minister Jafar Sharif-Emami, who told him that “order was rapidly evaporating and that he felt a military government was needed.” The prime minister said he doubted that the Shah’s strategy of trying to peel away moderate clergy and politicians from the Khomeini movement would succeed because Shariatmadari and the National Front lacked “courage.” When Sullivan asked why the army was not doing more to restore lost Iranian oil production, Sharif-Emami pinned the blame on Savak, which he intimated had gone rogue. Sullivan returned to his embassy in time for a luncheon appointment with Ambassador Tony Parsons. As the Briton’s Rolls-Royce swung into Roosevelt Avenue, Parsons took note of demonstrators filling the sidewalks and “the feeling of extreme tension was palpable.”
For the third day in a row, thousands of young protesters gathered outside the main gates of Tehran University, hurling projectiles and chanting. This time when they surged forward and began attacking a bank across the road the troops “sort of shrugged their shoulders, waved goodbye and were gone.” As if by prearranged signal, similar scenes were reported elsewhere in the capital. Trucks filled with army conscripts drove back to base and left the city’s flash points exposed to the crowds. Students surged toward the center of town waving staves and hurling rocks and bottles. Mobs from the bazaar joined in and “hijacked buses and lorries and set them on fire.… Workers in the Palace of Justice and the Commerce Ministry tore up pictures of the Shah and tossed them out of the window.”
The rioting followed the pattern of earlier insurrections in Tabriz and Isfahan. Buildings associated with foreigners were targeted for destruction, and “carpet stores owned by Jews were attacked, their ornate and priceless carpets dragged into the streets and burnt,” reported the correspondent for the Times of London. For the first time the students also set their sights on diplomatic missions. Dozens of youths clambered over the gates of the British embassy, overpowered the guards, and destroyed the guardhouse. They poured onto the grounds, ordered all the staff out of the main office block, and set it alight. Only the presence of Iranian Army tanks and troops prevented a second invasion of the U.S. embassy, from where Sullivan and Parsons watched incredulously as buildings to their left and right burst into flames: “One large eleven-story building two streets away became a towering inferno, burning for several hours before it collapsed in a heap of rubble with a resounding swoosh.”
Panic took hold in Tehran’s commercial district. Foreigners caught up in the riot were chased, abused, and roughed up. Americans Bruce and Eileen Vernor were lunching with friends when their driver ran into the restaurant and told them to quickly get out because “there is a mob coming toward us.” Diners grabbed their coats and bags and ran to safety just before the windows were smashed in. American advisers in the Ministry of Labor were “forcibly evicted” from their offices. Two Bell Helicopter employees barely escaped with their lives when their Iranian taxi driver was fatally shot in the head by a sniper while he was ferrying them across town. Fifty-six British stewardesses were trapped on the eleventh floor of the Imperial Hotel. “Below us on the streets rioters were burning pictures of the Shah and lighting massive bonfires,” said one woman. “They were smashing everything in sight. It was like a Guy Fawkes night gone mad.” An Iranian ran up to a Western journalist and ran his finger across his throat in a slitting motion. “The Shah is finished,” he said with a grin. “Write that.”
By the time American high school student Jonathan Kirkendall got home from school in the afternoon “smoke [was] rising over the town” and “we could hear guns going off.” “The mob spread garbage in the street right in front of our building and lit it on fire so that black columns of smoke were soon going up all around our building,” expatriate lawyer John Westberg wrote in his diary. “The rioters then picked up a minibus that was parked directly in front of our building, carried it a short distance around the corner, and laid it on its side squarely in the middle of the street to serve as a barricade to keep the martial law forces from coming through that way.” There were fraught scenes at the Tehran American School, where teachers and administrators struggled to safely evacuate thirty-six hundred children from two campuses in different parts of town. Elementary school principal Donna Colquitt, who had children as young as four-year-old kindergarteners to think about, rallied her teachers and administrators and reminded them of the job they had to do. “There will be no hysteria,” she instructed. “We will have no tears in front of the children.” The staff loaded the children into their minibuses and before each set off Donna climbed aboard and cheerfully told them that “they were playing a new game on the way home, and that they should get down on the floor until each one arrived home.” But the ride home was a terrifying ordeal for students whose buses strayed into the riot zone. The children heard rocks glancing off the window grilles and crouched low, saying not a word and hiding their faces in the hope that no one would see they were American.
Out on the streets, paper rained down from office windows like confetti, and buses and cars exploded in flames. The Radio City Cinema burst into flames. Buildings that housed Pan American World Airways, the German automobile manufacturer BMW, and the Irano-British Bank burned out of control. Mobs sacked the ground floor of the luxury Waldorf Hotel and used accelerants to light a fire that quickly spread through the lobby. In scenes straight out of The Towering Inferno, seventy-five terrified guests fled to the hotel roof while dozens of others were seen hanging out of upper windows, screaming for help. Two young men working on an adjacent construction site swung into action and pulled off a remarkably daring rescue operation. They attached a building pallet onto the boom of a crane and then lowered it onto the roof. The trapped guests scrambled aboard five at a time, lay down, and were carefully winched to the street below. Shortly after the last guest was lowered to safety the Waldorf went up like a blowtorch. Thick clouds of black smoke from four cinemas and an estimated 400 banks billowed over the Shah’s stricken capital. Army troops, police, and the emergency services were conspicuous by their absence. “As slogan-chanting demonstrators surged from neighborhood to neighborhood, breaking banks and igniting buildings—the Information Ministry among them—police, army and firefighting units often were nowhere to be seen,” reported the Los Angeles Times correspondent at the scene. “Only after a particular area had been hit, sometimes as much as a half-hour, did the troops appear, seemingly indifferent to renewed destruction raging only a block or two away.”
Ambassador Parsons decided to make a dash for it. He left his Rolls-Royce at Roosevelt Avenue and accepted Sullivan’s offer to drive back in an Iranian-made Peykan. Parsons’s plainclothes security detail followed behind in an unmarked police car. “When we emerged into the main street, I found myself faced by a scene such as I had not experienced since the end of the Second World War,” Parsons later wrote. “Fires were burning everywhere, furniture and office equipment had been piled in the middle of the street and set alight, burning cars and buses littered the roadway. Young men were dancing around in a frenzy, feeding the flames and plastering the few passing cars with stickers reading ‘Death to the Shah.’”
The two cars were edging past flaming debris in Ferdowsi Square when rioters spotted the radio in the police car. Parsons watched as a group of young men “wrenched open the doors and were trying to drag the occupants out. The last I saw of my escort, who eventually found their way back to the American embassy, was the car careering down a side street with three of its doors open and a mob of young men clinging to the sides.” Men clung to the roof of his own car and to save himself the British ambassador joined in the chants of “Death to the Shah!” Parsons retreated to the safety of the French embassy and didn’t make it back to his own smoldering compound until late afternoon.
* * *
COLUMNS OF SMOKE were clearly visible from Niavaran, where courtiers rushed to the windows to watch the city burn. In the late afternoon a large mob was seen advancing up the hill and the Imperial Guard took up defensive positions and moved Chieftain tanks and an antiaircraft battery into place. Barbed wire was strung around the perimeter of the palace grounds, and machine-gun-toting troops stood watch. General Khosrodad and several senior military officials flew over the city in a helicopter to survey the destruction. They were appalled by the scale of the carnage. “This has got to stop,” said Khosrodad. “We have to act severely or things will really get out of control.”
The generals returned to Niavaran and appealed to Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar to talk to the Shah, but the older man was quick to put them in their place. “I am the protocol chief,” he reminded them. “You are the generals. Why don’t you speak with him? You command all the military in Tehran. Why don’t you stop this nonsense?” They walked over to the Jahan Nama Palace, and when Afshar saw the Shah at the foot of the stairs he prostrated himself in the traditional manner, kneeling and gripping the monarch’s shoes. The generals fell to their knees, too. The Shah, who was embarrassed by their display, tried and failed to pull Afshar to his feet. “What is it?” he asked.
“Your Majesty, the city is on fire,” said Afshar. “The banks have been burned. The citizens’ possessions have been destroyed. Civil documents have been cast away. No one is safe. It is no longer clear what remains to the people or of the authority they can turn to. Please, Sire, something must be done.”
“But the army is attending to the matter,” the Shah told them. He was apparently unaware that the decision by the army to pull back earlier in the day had allowed the tide of vandalism to wash unchecked through the streets.
General Khosrodad stood and saluted. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Your Majesty,” he begged, “your army has become an object of scorn, contempt, disrespect. They spit on your soldiers. No honor remains to the Imperial forces. Your Majesty must order us to defend you, the country, and ourselves.”
The Shah, “visibly shaken” by this display of emotion, offered his assurance that “Of course, we shall take measures.” He returned to his office and asked Afshar to send for General Oveissi, which the generals interpreted as a sign that he meant to replace Sharif-Emami with his martial law administrator. The Shah also asked for the American and British ambassadors to join him at Niavaran so he could explain his decision to suspend civilian government.
Sullivan was the first to arrive. Usually when guests arrived at Niavaran they passed through security and were welcomed and announced by an aide-de-camp. This evening, however, the usual guards and courtiers were nowhere to be seen, their absence a sign that the Imperial Court was in a state of complete disarray. “While I was puzzling what to do next, a door from one of the small rooms off the drawing room opened and the Shahbanou came in,” said Sullivan. “She was obviously surprised to see me, and I had clearly not expected that she would be the first person I would encounter there.” Queen Farah arranged for Sullivan to be escorted to her husband’s study, where the Shah explained that he had run out of time and choices—a military government was inevitable. The ambassador responded that rumors were spreading that Savak agents had deliberately lit the fires to justify an army takeover. The Shah sighed and answered, “Who knows? These days I am prepared to believe anything.”
At one point the Shah answered a call on his private line. By now Sullivan knew enough Persian to “make out that he was telling [the Queen] of his intention to install a military government and answering some of the reservations she was expressing about such a decision. It was a gentle, patient sort of conversation with nothing peremptory in its tone.” Court liberals associated Oveissi with the debacle at Jaleh Square and feared that his appointment would doom any chance of a settlement with moderate clergy. Farah preferred General Gholam Reza Azhari, chief of the supreme commander’s staff, “a thinking, cultured man … considered a moderate who was open to dialogue.” When the call ended the Shah placed one of his own to General Azhari, asking him to come at once to the palace. He told Sullivan he had decided to appoint Azhari and not Oveissi to lead the new military government. The American expressed relief at the Shah’s decision to appoint a moderate and graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. They were eventually joined by Ambassador Parsons, who arrived at the palace in an armored personnel carrier and in a state of high dudgeon, still furious about the attack earlier in the day on his embassy compound. Unlike Sullivan, who believed the street gossip that Savak was behind the arson attacks, Parsons and his staff had concluded that Mujahedin guerrilla fighters were responsible: the scale and organization behind the violence fit the pattern of unrest seen elsewhere around the country.
Downstairs, courtiers and generals drank tea to celebrate what they assumed was Oveissi’s pending appointment to the premiership. Their fear was that the Shah would appoint another in a line of mild-mannered milquetoasts, men who lacked the guts to make the tough decisions. General Azhari, for example, was known in the officer corps as a man who spoke loudly and carried a small stick. He was also seen as too close to U.S. officials, who were known to oppose harsh measures to restore order. The crowd hushed. Sullivan and Parsons appeared at the top of the landing, and the crowd parted to let them walk through the grand lobby. The ambassadors brushed past General Khosrodad and his friend Kambiz Atabai. Atabai could not contain himself and asked Parsons, whom he knew socially, “Mr. Ambassador, who is going to be nominated prime minister?”
Before Parsons had a chance to reply, William Sullivan wheeled around and delivered the smug news everyone dreaded: “A civilized general.”
Khosrodad and Atabai were crushed by the news. “When we heard that we knew it would be Azhari,” said Atabai. “He was a good general for the salons but not a decisive man. And he did not want the job. In that moment I knew it was all over. We were finished.”
General Azhari most certainly did not want the job. He arrived as Sullivan and Parsons were on their way out. As he climbed the stairs he looked like a man consigned to the gallows.
* * *
ELLI ANTONIADES WAS in Greece when she heard that the Shah had appointed a military government. For the past several weeks daily life had become an ordeal for the Queen’s oldest and closest friend, who lived with her mother behind the Russian embassy near Rudaki Hall. Every morning now the two women opened their door to see the familiar refrain “Death to the Shah” painted in large letters. A friend had recently handed Elli a revolver and told her to keep it ready in case “they” came over the wall. She stubbornly refused to submit to the new regime on the streets or wear the obligatory head scarf. “People threw things, they yelled abuse,” she said. “A lot of women covered up because they felt threatened.”
Before leaving Athens to fly home to Tehran, she called on a friend who worked in the Greek foreign ministry. He asked why she was going back. “Elli,” he said. “It’s finished. It’s over.” “It was so difficult,” she remembered. “Not to understand, but to accept.”