How hurriedly we are putting nails to our coffin.
—THE SHAH
Tell the Shah that it is better that a thousand
Iranians die now than a million people die later.
—SADDAM HUSSEIN
On Monday, November 6, Iranians awoke to the news that the country was under military rule and a 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew. For the first time since the unrest began, troop commanders were handed orders to shoot martial law violators on sight. Twenty tanks entered the capital from the west, and tens of thousands of troops took up positions near key installations and trouble spots. There were scattered outbreaks of violence but no major challenges to the army. Troops fired into the air to break up small crowds around Rudaki Hall, Tehran University, and the British embassy, but otherwise the streets were quiet. The threat to shoot curfew violators and rioters was popular among Tehranis still shell-shocked by Sunday’s rampages. “A jolly good job, too,” an office worker told an American foreign correspondent. “I think shooting is the best thing. These people [the rioters] are mad.” “We feel the army will give us protection now,” said a construction worker repairing the entryway to the battered Waldorf Hotel. The driver of a pickup truck agreed with that sentiment: “Maybe now we get peace.”
This time martial law was backed up by arrests. Leading dissidents and opposition leaders were detained, and censorship was reimposed. Schools and universities were closed for one week and street gatherings of more than two people were banned. Tehranis cautiously ventured into the streets to stock up on food and other essentials. “Long lines of automobiles and people with plastic containers formed at gasoline stations in the capital of the second-largest oil exporting country in the world,” reported the New York Times. “With almost no bus transportation and relatively few cars on the streets, businesses closed and some food shortages developed. Uncollected garbage piles are rising throughout the city.” The country’s telex system remained out of order. Credit dried up, investment was frozen, capital flight accelerated, and people rushed to buy foreign exchange. Along with the hardship there was a general sense of relief that the authorities had finally intervened to restore order. With Iran’s major cities secure, the battle for Iran’s future moved from streets in the north to the oil fields in the south. The intellectuals, students, and leftists weren’t about to give up and decided to try to collapse the national economy with the help of striking oil workers. “With the oil workers on our side, we found new confidence,” said one protest leader. Skeleton crews kept oil output at 1.2 million barrels a day, barely enough for domestic consumption but far below the usual 6 million barrels required for export. “We were suppressed for so many years,” said an oil worker. “We suffered for so long that now we have burst. It was not the Shah who liberalized but we who grasped liberalization from him. We took it.”
Reza Ghotbi arrived at Jahan Nama Palace on Monday morning with a television crew in tow. The night before, the Shah had phoned him at home requesting help to write a speech he planned to give to the Iranian people the next day explaining his decision to install a military administration. “Sire, I am not a speechwriter,” Ghotbi protested. The silence on the other end of the line convinced him otherwise. “I had the impression he thought or may think I am refusing his request. So I said, ‘I will do whatever Your Majesty wants me to do.’” He offered to consult with Hushang Nahavandi and Hossein Nasr in putting together a draft.
“Nasr,” said the Shah.
“What does Your Majesty want in the speech?”
“I will bring a patriotic government,” explained the voice on the other end of the line, “but because of the turmoil I have to bring in a military government first.”
Ghotbi reminded the Shah that “military governments are also patriotic.”
“I don’t mean patriotic,” the Shah said, correcting himself. “I mean democratic. I am going to send you some notes people have written for the speech.” He was referring to former prime ministers Ali Amini and Amir Hoveyda who had been asked for their thoughts.
Later that night a court official drove to Ghotbi’s house and delivered typed-up notes for the draft. Ghotbi noticed that one phrase in particular was underlined and circled for emphasis: “I have heard the voice of the revolution.”
The Shah’s hero de Gaulle had expressed similar sentiments to the people of France when he made his dramatic appeal to them in 1968 to rally to his side, and like his hero the Shah wanted to deliver a speech that cloaked him in the mantle of national unity while acknowledging past mistakes. Trying to achieve a balance between strength and contrition would not be easy. “In my mind that was what he wanted,” said Ghotbi. “From the notes, and from our conversations, my idea was that the Shah was the Good King, the father of the country.” Ghotbi recalled a story the Shah had told him from his youth. During a visit to the provinces an old woman had approached him and said, “You are younger than my son, but you are my father.” Her words had stayed with the Shah ever since. “What I thought he wanted to do was say, ‘I am the loving father of his nation but at this moment what the nation needs is tough love.’” The Shah made it clear that he wanted Ghotbi to collaborate with Hossein Nasr. “For months, I and Ghotbi would say to the Shah, ‘Why don’t you talk to the people?’” said Nasr.
On Monday morning, Ghotbi and Nasr went to the Queen’s chambers with their speech draft but found her out of sorts. The unrest of the previous day had frayed her nerves. “She came out and said she couldn’t read the speech because she had taken a sleeping pill and was not alert,” said Ghotbi. Farah read the speech only after it was delivered. “I did not find anything wrong with it,” she said. “But I don’t know what transpired before. Dr. Nasr says the ideas came from His Majesty. Who was involved in drawing up those ideas I do not know.”
The Shah became testy when by late morning he still had not read the speech. “I was asked to see what had happened to the speech,” said Amir Afshar. “I was informed that Reza Ghotbi and Hossein Nasr had taken the draft of the speech to the Empress. Once I informed the Shah of this, he became very angry.” “Why have they taken the speech to Her Majesty?” demanded the Shah. “Is she the one who reads it on television? Am I not to read it at least once to know what it contains before I deliver it?” Ghotbi and Nasr hurried over. “For the first time, the Shah came to my office, and sat behind my desk,” recalled Afshar, who called in two secretaries in case the Shah wanted to make notes and changes. As the Shah read through the speech he expressed concern because he thought it “put him in a position of weakness.” “I should not say the things that have been written here for me,” he protested.
Ghotbi and Nasr assured him that “if he were to give a speech of this sort, he might as well put himself squarely on the side of the people and say what the people wanted him to say.” “Your Majesty, you have to say now what the people want to hear and you have to raise their spirits and change the atmosphere.” The Shah threw the speech down on the desk and, followed by Afshar, stalked out. After calming down he made several revisions, but with no time to rehearse before the two o’clock deadline he swallowed his reservations and decided to proceed. “He was not forced or manipulated,” said Ghotbi.
Instead of the usual two o’clock national news broadcast, the Iranian people tuned in to watch and listen as the Shah explained his decision to install a military government. He appeared ill at ease, tense, and gaunt. He struggled to read the handheld cue cards from behind his desk. “In the climate of liberalization which began gradually two years ago you arose against oppression and corruption,” he began. “The revolution of the Iranian people cannot fail to have my support as the monarch of Iran and as an Iranian.” The Shah, who had already surrendered his executive powers, now proceeded to bury his legacy. “I once again repeat my oath to the Iranian nation to undertake not to allow the past mistakes, unlawful acts, oppression and corruption to recur but to make up for them,” he mechanically intoned. “I heard the revolutionary message of you the people, the Iranian nation. I am the guardian of the constitutional monarchy which is a God given gift. A gift entrusted to the Shah by the people.” It was a phrase that became synonymous with appeasement and surrender.
The Shah’s speech evoked not de Gaulle but another French ruler, Louis XVI, sent to the block with his wife, Marie Antoinette, and Nicholas II, the Russian emperor shot and bayoneted with his wife, Empress Alexandra, and their children and servants in a Siberian cellar in 1918. “In this speech, instead of pointing to all the good things done in the country, and all the progress, he only spoke about the failures,” observed Amir Afshar. “The speech was a total failure.” The servile, apologetic tone caused revulsion among royalists, who could not bear the humiliation of watching the King of Kings debase himself before the mullahs. “The tone was contrite,” reported Time. “The words were conciliatory. The old imperial arrogance was gone.… The speech was unprecedented for Iran’s proud autocrat.”
Royalists who had not yet left the country began packing their bags: they could tell that the Shah had no fight left in him. Liberals were more hopeful that the speech might appease moderate ulama and persuade the National Front and the Liberation Movement to reach an accommodation with the palace. “People called the court and said they liked the speech,” said Ghotbi. “Shariatmadari said he had tears in his eyes.” The Shah was polite enough to phone Nasr afterward and thank him for his work. Later, he considered the speech one of his biggest regrets. “I should never have agreed to give this speech,” he admitted to Afshar.
* * *
IN PARIS ON November 6, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini told a large crowd of journalists gathered at Neauphle-le-Château that he would not relent in his crusade to bring down the monarchy. “In one hand, the Shah held out a letter of repentance for his crimes, but in the other he held out a bayonet and a gun,” he jeered. “Until the day an Islamic republic is installed the struggle of our people will continue.” He expressed “great bitterness” toward the U.S. government for its continued support for the Shah. “The relationship between the American government and our government that is now like that of a master and a servant should finally cease and a healthy relationship would then replace it.” As long as the United States remained “hostile to our Islamic movement our attitude will be negative.” Khomeini repeated his earlier call for soldiers in the Iranian army “to join the people” against “the traitor.”
In the months since Khomeini’s arrival in Paris, Abolhassan Banisadr, Ibrahim Yazdi, and Sadegh Ghotzbadegh had successfully molded his public image in the foreign press as a venerable sage leading an uprising against a corrupt and cruel king. Reporters were required to submit their questions each morning in advance of Khomeini’s daily fifteen-minute afternoon press conferences. The several-hours delay gave Banisadr and his media relations committee time to draft replies, which were intended to present Khomeini as a social moderate, respectful of women’s rights and human rights, tolerant of different political views, yet a dedicated anti-Communist. They emphasized that Khomeini had no interest in politics and was opposed to only those aspects of the Shah’s modernization program that did not help the poor. Banisadr told reporters that Khomeini “rejects the authoritarian models of Islamic republicanism in much of the Arab world. Iran is not an Arab country.” After he returned to Iran, he explained, Khomeini would leave politics to the politicians and spend the rest of his days in a seminary in Qom.
Khomeini went along with the game but at times chafed against his handlers’ constraints. He could barely contain the hatred he felt for Americans. In his November 6 press conference he insisted that “at least 45,000” American military advisers were in Iran and that the Iranian Army was “totally under their control.” This was yet another gross exaggeration: only 5,000 of the approximately 52,000 Americans living in Iran were military personnel. The rest were dependents, civilian professionals, and Americans married to Iranians. Khomeini’s condemnation of all Americans living in Iran as “hostile to our Islamic movement” placed everyone, including women and children, in the direct line of fire.
* * *
IN WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT Carter’s national security team met at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, November 6, to discuss the Tehran riots and their aftermath. If a week was a long time in politics, the seventy-two hours since National Security Adviser Brzezinski had assured Jimmy Carter that Iran was not in the throes of a full-scale revolution was a lifetime. Brzezinski was especially critical of the CIA, which apparently had failed to anticipate the serious nature of unrest, and also of Ambassador Sullivan, who he had learned had been in contact with the revolutionaries.
One of the most pressing questions facing officials was what to do with the large American community residing in Iran. Popular hatred toward the Shah extended to Americans, who were blamed for propping up the regime and profiting from the oil boom. American citizens reported daily harassment in the streets. American homes were firebombed, businesses invaded and sacked, and family pets poisoned. “There has been an increase in number of random telephone threats to foreigners,” reported the U.S. embassy. “Many callers know name of recipient and those receiving calls are being advised to leave Iran in 24 hours, two weeks, or by December 2, or be killed.” The date marked the start of the Muslim holy month of Muharram. “Absence of newspapers and minimal reporting on radio have left both Iranians and foreigners prey to loosest kind of rumors. Example is story which is untrue, repeat untrue, that three Americans were killed evening November 8 in Tajrish area of north Tehran. It appears opposition is attempting to increase psychological pressure on foreign residents by threats and rumor-mongering.” Some companies began pulling out family dependents but most followed official instructions to stay in place and hunker down.
In Washington, officials considered an airlift using wide-bodied jets and aircraft carriers but admitted an evacuation could take nine or ten days, assuming Iranian airports remained open. The other question was how an evacuation would affect the Shah’s confidence and army morale. Brzezinski shut down the conversation: “Any discussion of evacuation implies doubts about the Shah and about U.S.-Iranian relations, which can be very damaging.”
The Israeli government was not about to wait and see what December would bring. The Shah’s November 6 speech to the nation provided a convenient cover for three El Al airliners to leave Iranian airspace on Monday, bound for Tel Aviv. The 365 passengers on board comprised the final airlift of Israeli citizens from Iranian soil. With the exception of Israeli diplomatic staff and their families who stayed behind, everyone else was safely out.
* * *
IRANIANS EXPECTED PRIME Minister Azhari to take a no-nonsense approach to unrest and end the strategy of concessions. They were startled when in his first address to the Majles he preached conciliation instead and even recited quotes from the Quran. “We are in office temporarily,” he intoned. “Once order is restored, we will hand over power to a truly national government which will organize entirely free elections and which will grant all liberties.” Azhari invited the ulama to join new “emergency committees” established by the military to enforce order in riot-torn cities. They rejected the offer, and the National Front called instead for more strikes. But while the opposition rejected Azhari’s authority, Niavaran swiftly agreed to his demands to cooperate with an investigation into the finances of all members of the Imperial Family and secure the Shah’s authorization to arrest former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and other former top officials on charges relating to graft, financial mismanagement, and abuse of power. Others prominent on the list included Dariush Homayoun, the former minister of information who back in January had ordered Ettelaat to print the defamatory letter against Khomeini that sparked the riots in Qom, and Gholam Reza Nikpey, former mayor of Tehran.
Faced with Azhari’s request, the Shah summoned the Queen and their closest advisers to his office to discuss the matter. “I am being pressed to authorize the arrest of Hoveyda, under the powers allowed by martial law, because they say it would pacify public opinion,” he said. “Let me ask you to give me your advice on this matter.” The consensus among those in the room was that the arrested men would be well looked after by the military and ensured a fair trial. But elderly court minister Ardalan expressed disgust at the idea they should serve up their own to appease the mobs. “I do not understand how you can arrest a former prime minister who was in power for thirteen years,” he protested. At one point the Shah’s phone rang and the others watched as he listened in silence. He hung up the receiver and told them they had run out of time. Later, he told his wife that Savak chief General Moghadam had informed him that “Mr. Hoveyda’s arrest was more important than our daily bread.” The group approved the arrests but the Shah balked at phoning Hoveyda as a courtesy to explain his decision. “That would not be easy for me,” he said. He turned to the Queen: “You could do it, perhaps.”
“Why me?” Farah protested. “He was your prime minister, not mine!”
The Shah hurriedly swallowed the pill: “It shall be done.” But as the meeting broke up he was heard to say, “How hurriedly we are putting nails to our coffin.”
* * *
ON ROOSEVELT AVENUE, Ambassador Sullivan decided that the Shah was finished.
The ambassador wrote a lengthy cable to Washington titled “Thinking the Unthinkable,” in which he argued that the Shah’s basis of support had shrunk to the military, which was unlikely to sanction a bloodbath to keep him in power. The ideal scenario Sullivan laid out was the departure of the Shah and his top generals into exile, followed by an accommodation between younger officers and the opposition. “The religious [people] would find it useful for the military to remain intact because they have no Islamic instruments for maintaining law and order,” Sullivan advised. Khomeini “could be expected to return to Iran in triumph and hold a Gandhi-like position in the political constellation.” Because Khomeini was likely to choose as his new prime minister a politician like Mehdi Bazargan, who could work alongside the military, moderates and anti-Communists were likely to win the 1979 elections. It was a gamble, but if the Shah was replaced by Khomeini the Iran of the 1980s would likely assume a less pro-Western posture in international relations but could still be relied on as an important anchor of stability in the Persian Gulf. According to Sullivan’s logic, Khomeini was not a threat to U.S. interests. The “Thinking the Unthinkable” telegram became the basis for what Henry Precht later referred to with dry disdain as “Sullivan’s grand idea that Khomeini and the military could run the country.” In fact, the ideas expressed in the telegram were not those of Sullivan but of Mehdi Bazargan, leader of the Liberation Movement of Iran, which showed the extent to which the ambassador and his diplomats had become influenced by English-speaking, Westernized republican Iranians.
The telegram showed that William Sullivan was at sea in Iran: the complexities of the country’s political fabric, its religious traditions, its culture, and the characteristics of its people eluded him. What Sullivan failed so spectacularly to understand was that many Iranians, including most farmers, workers, moderate ulama, and conservatives in the middle and upper-middle classes, still supported the Shah and counted themselves as royalists. Khomeini was one of only several marjas—and the junior one at that—but Sullivan bestowed on him the title “leader” and inexplicably decided he was a pacifist in the spirit of Gandhi. He was utterly wrong on the question of the military. The Shah’s generals, men such as Oveissi, Badrei, and Khosrodad, consummate military professionals and patriots who had sworn their lives to serve crown and kingdom, were not about to voluntarily board planes and hand Iran over to the mullahs. If anything, they were prepared to either stage a coup or retreat to the south and then wage civil war.
Though Sullivan ended his telegram endorsing the current U.S. policy of supporting the Shah and the military, he made it clear to his senior counselors that the telegram should be interpreted as their blueprint for action. “Sullivan had these ideas himself,” confirmed George Lambrakis. “And he talked Washington into it. Basically, Sullivan was trying to walk his way through the muck. He was also working closely with Tony Parsons. We thought the moderates might have enough weight to balance Khomeini. We believed that Khomeini would go to Qom. Khomeini was the big political ayatollah but he was not the main ayatollah. We believed he was isolated and his religious credentials were not of the highest order but his political influence was.” Sullivan pursued a self-paralyzing policy. On the one hand, the ambassador pressed the Shah to continue with liberalization and appoint Azhari, a softhearted military prime minister unlikely to crack down hard on dissent. “We didn’t want to be responsible for shedding blood or a repeat of 1953,” explained Lambrakis. Yet the Shah’s refusal to use force made him appear weak in Sullivan’s eyes. “When the Shah failed to react strongly after Jaleh Square and November 5, we concluded he was finished,” said Stempel. “He was fucked! He would not order the troops to shoot. If he’d come down hard he would have survived.” But the Americans also concluded they were powerless. “After November 5 nobody gave a shit what we thought,” Stempel admitted. “The U.S. was sidelined.”
Through his words and deeds, Ambassador Sullivan sent Mehdi Bazargan the unmistakable signal that he was ready to cut a deal on behalf of the United States, in effect declaring American neutrality and offering Khomeini an assurance that “we were not involved on either side, to let them know that the Americans were perfectly prepared to deal with them.” Though the ambassador had not cleared his strategy with the White House, Bazargan naturally assumed from Sullivan’s behavior that the Carter administration had withdrawn support from the Shah. In fact, Sullivan’s strategy encouraged the Shah’s enemies and removed one of the last obstacles to a takeover of Iran by Islamic fundamentalists.
* * *
IN LATE NOVEMBER, Queen Farah became involved in two extraordinary initiatives to try to prevent collapse. The first involved Shahpur Bakhtiar, one of the leaders of the National Front and a former cabinet minister in Mohammad Mossadeq’s government. Bakhtiar’s grandfather had been executed by the Qajars, and his father was jailed and executed under Reza Shah, and as he once told his cousin Reza Ghotbi, “I have blues on my skin from the Shah’s jail.” Yet Bakhtiar had never walked in lockstep with his allies on the secular left. Though he opposed the Shah’s personal rule, he admired the general thrust of his social and economic reforms, and he was appalled that men such as Bazargan were prepared to set aside their own deeply held principles and accept Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-Shah forces, whom he regarded as “barbarians.” Bakhtiar worried that the extremists could easily overpower the leftists and democrats who lacked their own charismatic leader and were not trained for armed combat.
After Bakhtiar made his concerns clear, former prime minister Jamshid Amuzegar gently steered him toward the Imperial Court. Bakhtiar hoped to enter into a dialogue with the Shah but refused to come to Niavaran until he had a better sense of the monarch’s attitude toward political reform. The Queen asked her husband, “Do you want me to go and talk to him and see what his position is?” He agreed, and Farah arranged a clandestine rendezvous at the home of her aunt Louise Ghotbi, Reza’s mother. Farah’s role as mediator between the Shah and Bakhtiar was carried out with the blessing of both men, though later she was accused by her critics of promoting Bakhtiar to advance her own clan interests. In true Iranian fashion, and although the two had never before met, Farah and Bakhtiar were related. “My mother was the sister of Bakhtiar’s mother,” said her cousin Reza Ghotbi. “Although we were first cousins I had never met him, though I knew his son, Yves, because Shahpur was much older. My mother didn’t like his policies. We had a very large family. I had five uncles and I only met two of them.” Farah’s critics neglected to point out that Bakhtiar was more closely related to Queen Soraya, who was also a cousin, and that as late as November she still believed Hushang Nahavandi was the best candidate for the premiership.
The Queen’s meeting with Bakhtiar took place on a cold, overcast late November day. Louise Ghotbi’s house was a two-mile drive from the palace, and Farah set off, with her security detail bringing up the rear. Bakhtiar arrived thirty minutes early and spent the time chatting with Mme Ghotbi. “He told her she looked so much like her sister,” said her son Reza, “and that he lost his mother when he was very young and he always wanted to see the aunt who looked like his mother.” The Queen arrived and Louise withdrew to leave them alone. After formalities, Bakhtiar began by launching into a litany of complaints. “He made an analysis of the situation. He lamented the past—the Shah had ruled instead of the government—and said the Shah must reign and not rule. If he had done that we wouldn’t be here. Everything was going wrong and it all pointed in one direction—to him.” Farah listened patiently but felt there was no time to waste. “Look,” she said, “the country is in deep trouble. We now must concentrate on saving it rather than harping on the past.” Bakhtiar said he agreed with her. He was prepared to meet with the Shah if certain conditions were met. They included the release from jail of opposition leader Karim Sanjabi, who had been detained following his trip to Paris to see Khomeini. Farah returned to Niavaran and briefed her husband on the conversation. They both felt this first contact was promising. Bakhtiar supported the Constitution and the monarchy, and he would not let old grudges get in the way of working for the national interest. His name was put on a short list of names for the position of the next civilian prime minister.
The Queen’s second initiative was led by her private secretary Hossein Nasr, who was involved in intense negotiations with moderate ulama. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari still had not given up on reaching an accommodation with the Shah, though he was under relentless pressure from Khomeini’s agents in Qom, who surrounded his residence and spied on him. “At the height of the revolution Shariatmadari wanted to talk to the Shah,” said Nasr. “But there were men downstairs with guns. He said to me, ‘I can’t call until nine p.m., when the gunmen have gone. I will go to the women’s part of the house and call you on my wife’s phone.’” The day and time were arranged, and the Shah sat by his phone for two hours, waiting for the Marja’s call. But Shariatmadari was unable to get away and the conversation never happened. “I don’t know what is happening in Iran,” said the Marja. “It is erupting like a volcano, and, like a volcano, after building up pressure for years and years it is impossible to stop.”
Next, Nasr set his sights on Grand Ayatollah Abol Qasem Khoi, who lived out of harm’s way in Najaf and led the “quietist” school favored by Musa Sadr. Despite the publicity that surrounded Khomeini, Khoi enjoyed the status as paramount marja and boasted the biggest following among the Shia faithful. “Khoi was not siding with the revolutionaries,” said Nasr. “And he did not believe this was the role of Shiism. He was the supreme enlightened one, the most emulated by the Shia. I decided to go and visit him.” Nasr decided that Queen Farah should accompany him so that she could be seen in the presence of the most influential and popular of the marjas. “It was Dr. Nasr’s idea,” she recalled. “The idea was that if I go and see Khoi he might say something [in public] to help ease the problems.” Her willingness to go, and Khoi’s decision to receive her, showed just how desperate the moderates were to try to form a block against Khomeini’s ambitions. Farah was escorted by Nasr and accompanied by her mother, Mrs. Diba; her children Farahnaz and Ali Reza; Reza Ghotbi; and two generals.
The Queen and her party flew first to Baghdad on November 18, where they were met at the airport by Iraq’s minister of health. When they arrived at their guest villa they learned that Saddam Hussein wished to pay his respects. His motorcade pulled up at four o’clock and he swept in with his entourage. Nasr was impressed with the Iraqi leader’s height, dark good looks, and natty dress sense: “He arrived wearing a European suit with an Islamic cloak, an abaya, which fell off when he shrugged his shoulders, and his servants rushed to pick it up.” It made for great theater. Farah introduced Hussein to her mother and then to Nasr. He shook everyone’s hands and then told Nasr, fluent in Arabic, that he had something to tell the Queen in private.
Saddam Hussein, the Queen, and Nasr moved to a side room, where they shared a small sofa. Nasr sat between them and translated. Hussein had already offered to assassinate Khomeini, whom he worried was stirring grievances and sectarian tensions inside Iraq, which, like Iran, was a Shia-majority society. He preferred a stable, pro-Western Iran under the Shah to a radical theological state that might be tempted to export its revolution throughout the region. The Iraqi turned to Nasr and calmly said, “Tell Her Majesty to tell my brother the Shah to take out his tanks and guns and turn them against the revolutionaries. Tell him it is better that a thousand Iranians die now than a million people die later.” Nasr translated this to Farah “and we looked at each other.” After Hussein left they agreed that Farah would go back to Niavaran and relay the Iraqi strongman’s advice to her husband.
From Baghdad they traveled to Najaf to see Khoi. This was not an easy trip for Farah. Since childhood she had associated the mullahs with bullying and repression. She bitterly resented them for cheering her husband to his face for so many years while plotting behind his back. “All these mullahs would push each other out of the way to have pictures taken with the King,” she remembered with distaste. The trip to Najaf made her nervous. “I was uncomfortable. I remember entering the small entrance to his house and everyone was sitting around [looking obsequious].” There was a momentary flash of anger when Khoi’s aides told her not to look directly at him. “I was told to look down. It was very difficult. He started talking Turkish with me because he knew my family came from Azerbaijan, but I don’t speak Turkish.”
Khoi told Farah that he acknowledged the Shah as the true Custodian of the Faith. He said he would pray for her husband, and in keeping with tradition presented her with a gold ring to give him. But he offered no public statement of support that could be used to rally the majority of the Shia people to the Shah’s side. He proceeded to lecture the Queen on the state of daily life in a country he had not lived in for decades. “In Iran people are dying of hunger,” he said. Farah was indignant. This was like Khomeini telling the world that schoolchildren in Iran ate grass to survive and that a hundred thousand people were behind bars. She wouldn’t let these lies go unchallenged. “What hunger?” she retorted. Her decision to talk back struck a nerve. The paramount Marja decided that the Queen of Iran, though a direct relative of the Prophet, still needed to be taken to the woodshed and schooled in how to behave like a good Muslim wife. He regarded Farah as willful and therefore deviant. “At the end,” said Queen Farah, “he told me, ‘You are a Moslem, your pictures should not be in the newspapers, and you should not shake hands with me.’ He lectured me on my clothes and about modesty.”
Farah’s mission to Najaf ended in failure, but at least an effort had been made. She returned to Niavaran to give her husband Khoi’s ring and passed on Saddam Hussein’s message to bloody the opposition. As she expected, he dismissed the idea as repellent: “I cannot sully my hands with the blood of my people.”
* * *
TEHRAN UNDER MARTIAL law was a shadowland of rumor, intrigue, and barely suppressed hysteria. “In the downtown area, barricades have gone up around the ravages of burned-out cinemas and bars, and steel plates have replaced broken windows,” reported Time. “Not many Iranian women venture out into the streets anymore; those who do shroud themselves in the chador, the long black veil that has become a sort of silent symbol of solidarity with the protest movement. Because everyone has to get home before the 9 p.m. curfew, the cocktail hour begins and ends earlier. Conversation, in more fashionable circles, tends to center on the shortage of butane gas for cooking and whether to stay and support the Shah or get out. Then everyone says their farewells and leaves, only to become ensnarled in a huge traffic jam on their way home. Promptly at 9 the shrill of the traffic gives way to silence and a long low rumble: the Shah’s tanks are once again rolling into position.”
As the world around them collapsed, Tehranis were prepared to believe the most fantastic and bizarre conspiracy theories. Iran’s most persecuted religious minority, the Baha’i, supposedly pulled the strings of revolution. The British government plotted with the Freemasons to divide the Middle East between them. The CIA orchestrated the labor unrest in the southern oil fields. Queen Farah plotted a coup to depose her husband and seize the Peacock Throne. “The condition affects even the most rational and educated of men,” the Los Angeles Times reported from Abadan. “Many people here and in Tehran are convinced that the Israelis are here helping the Shah put down public unrest. During the recent disturbances in Tehran, one Iranian pointed to troops guarding an intersection and said they were Israelis. When the soldiers were questioned, however, they answered in the everyday Farsi of the average Iranian. But the man still wasn’t convinced.” The belief that an unseen hand guided events from afar was not new. The Shah himself suspected that the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union schemed to divide Iran among them. The conspiracy theories conveniently relieved Iranians, and middle-class Iranians in particular, of any responsibility for the catastrophe befalling the kingdom.
Middle-class Iran’s fatal attraction to Khomeini and fundamentalist Islam revealed itself one night in late November. In recent months the country had been rattled by reports of flying saucers and monsters, and these omens of doom set the scene for the remarkable collective hysteria that gripped Iran on the evening of Monday, November 27. It began, as everything seemed to in those fraught days, with a rumor. Word spread in the mosques that an old lady who lived in Qom had found a stray hair belonging to the Prophet Mohammad in the pages of her Quran. This discovery was accompanied by an apparition who shared the revelation that on the evening of the next full moon Khomeini’s face would be visible on its surface only to believers. The rumor held special significance because of the advent of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar, whose tenth day, Ashura, commemorated the slaying of Imam Husayn at the hands of Caliph Yazid in AD 680. For years, Khomeini had compared the Shah to Yazid and criminalized him as an apostate and traitor to the Shia nation. Indeed it was with this in mind that Khomeini’s closest aides—Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti was the likely instigator—fashioned the tale of the old woman, the stray hair, and the man on the moon.
At the appointed hour hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Iranians came out onto the streets and crowded rooftops to marvel at the sight of their Marja staring back at them from the face of the moon. The phenomenon affected rich and poor alike. At a dinner party hosted by Gholam Reza Afkhami, who worked on social issues for Queen Farah, some of the most learned men and women in the kingdom “traced Khomeini’s face in the moon with their fingers.” Even the Shah’s valet, Amir Pourshaja, bore witness. “One night we heard the rumor, we went up on the roof to see Khomeini in the moon,” he said. “People with us could see his beard.” No one wanted to be left out—not even the Tudeh Party. The official organ of Iran’s atheistic Communist Party performed the ideological feat of a triple somersault with its gushing account of the big night. “Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini, the Breaker of Idols, in the moon,” blustered Tudeh’s official organ. “A few pip-squeaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.”
The Communists may have been taken in by the collective delusion, but Khomeini’s fellow marjas scolded him for his shameless trickery and expressed outrage that his agents were prepared to use the Quran to further his political ambitions. One senior ayatollah in Mashad spread a rumor of his own, telling his congregants that he had been visited in his sleep by Imam Reza, who told him that “true Shiites should not oppose a Shah who was named after both the Prophet and the eighth Imam.” Sure enough, statues of the Shah that had been pulled down in Mashad were restored to their plinths. Khomeini’s agents countered by spreading the lie that “the ayatollah of Mashad suffered periodic moments of hallucination prompted by an upset stomach,” and the Shah’s statues were pulled down again. The Grand Ayatollah justified the man-in-the-moon story as one of many “spontaneous initiatives of the people.”
Khomeini’s “moon trick” convinced the Shah that he had utterly failed in his efforts to modernize Iran. Despite the billions he had invested in education, training, and industry, when the Iranian people were faced with a choice between his vision of progress and modernity and Khomeini’s face in the moon, they had succumbed to a fairy tale and corner store magic. He felt sickened and embarrassed—his children had let him down. “For me everything is at an end,” he lamented. “Even if I return to Iran one day as Shah, nothing will be the same again. It is like a beautiful crystal vase that is broken for good; repair it and it will still show the same cracks.” A palace aide remarked that Iran was “returning to the Dark Ages,” and the Shah answered him, “I wonder if we ever left them.” He mused aloud why he had even bothered. “Why?” he asked his valet. “I worked for thirty-seven years. Why?”
Not so long ago the gates at Niavaran Palace had swung open to welcome presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, Nobel laureates and Oscar-winning actors. Now the atmosphere at Niavaran resembled a “ghost ship.” “Usually there was protocol,” said Reza Ghotbi. “But it disappeared.” The Shah himself seemed isolated from events. Behind closed doors and in rare interviews he struggled to come to terms with the collapse of his life’s work. “His eyes betrayed immense sadness,” wrote Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave. “When I asked him what he had felt as rioters tossed pictures of himself and Queen Farah into bonfires, his eyes glistened, but he fought back the tears and remained silent. He wanted to say something, but the words choked his throat.” The Shah’s bleak mood reflected his physical decline. The weight loss that started over the summer was now plainly, shockingly visible. French physicians Jean Bernard and Georges Flandrin continued to fly into and out of Tehran, monitoring his reaction to the medication and drawing blood samples. Since Alam’s death they had lost access to the safe house in northern Tehran and were obliged to stay in tourist hotels that could not guarantee their security or privacy. “The worse events became, the less I wanted to put my nose outside,” said Flandrin, “for the demonstrations, the electricity failures, the street demonstrations—sometimes bordering on riots—made even the short visits I had to make to the palace quite a problem.” The Shah remained, as ever, patient and courteous, “but the visits were brief and, especially at our last meetings, one could feel that he was extremely tense and preoccupied.”
Despite his evident distress, the Shah did not spend his days sitting alone in a corner feeling sorry for himself. He holed up in his office, calling around the country, counseling his generals, and reminding them to avoid bloodshed at all costs. “He was seeing people morning till night,” the Queen attested. Former ministers, ambassadors, generals, industrialists, and artists dropped by with suggestions, and he received and listened to them all. Few had any sound or even rational ideas for a way out of the morass. One former government minister recommended that the Shah appease the mobs by hanging a hundred of his closest aides in central Tehran. Others sent advice from afar, not all of it helpful or relevant. The Pahlavis had entertained former California governor Ronald Reagan back in April. “Shoot the first man in front,” he advised the Shah, “and the rest will fall into line.” Reagan, observed Ardeshir Zahedi, “did not understand how serious the problem was.”
Newspaper columnist Joseph Kraft from the New York Times visited Niavaran in late November. The Shah, who received him in a second-floor salon, “looked pale, spoke in subdued tones, and seemed dwarfed by the vast expanse of the room, with its huge, ornate chandeliers and heavy Empire furniture. He wore a double-breasted suit whose blackness suggested mourning.” Kraft began by pointing out that the Shah still held several advantages over his adversaries. The army was intact, the clergy was divided, and the opposition was not united. Surely, he asked, these groups “could be played off against each other”?
The Shah shrugged his shoulders “in an elaborate show of disbelief.” “Possibly,” he answered without enthusiasm.
Kraft reminded him that the army was loyal.
“You can’t crack down on one block and make the people on the next block behave.”
Joseph Kraft was puzzled. This was not the Shah he had known for so many years. Where was the old confidence and hubris? In all their previous encounters he had never seen Iran’s king “so sombre.” He asked the Shah “when the black mood had begun.”
“Sometime in the summer.”
“Any special reason?”
“Events.”
Kraft said he had heard—most likely from Ambassador Sullivan—that “maybe he was overdoing the blues to elicit sympathy and perhaps support from the United States.”
“What could America do?”
The American then inquired what the Shah’s advisers “thought was going to happen.”
“Many things,” the Shah answered with a brittle laugh. He rose from his chair to signal that their audience, like his dream of a new Iran, was over.