We are leaving for a long-needed rest and shall soon return.
—THE SHAH
We are leaving. God knows what will happen.
—QUEEN FARAH
The final days were an agony. Following Shahpur Bakhtiar’s presentation of his new cabinet at Niavaran on Saturday, January 6, 1979, the Shah confirmed that as soon as his new prime minister won a parliamentary vote of confidence he planned to leave Iran for an indeterminate period of time. “I’m tired,” he said. “I need a rest. If this rest takes place in a foreign country, a Regency Council will be created according to the Constitution. More important than this is that the wheels of the economy start turning again and that the economy returns to normal, because if this does not happen, I don’t see a good future for the country, I don’t forecast a happy future for any Iranian.” Grand Ayatollah Khomeini immediately denounced Bakhtiar’s government as illegal and declared the formation of a rival shadow cabinet called the Council of the Islamic Revolution. He made it clear that he would hold American citizens responsible if the Iranian military tried to foment a coup when the Shah left. “The influence of the U.S. in the Iranian military is well known,” he said. “A military coup will be implemented by the Americans in the eyes of the Iranian people. It is difficult to imagine a coup that could take over without the influence of the Americans.”
Ambassador Sullivan was so anxious to prove American goodwill to the revolutionaries that he all but helped walk the Shah to the door. Each time the Shah returned from his audiences with Sullivan, he told Queen Farah that Sullivan pestered him about a departure date. “He keeps asking, ‘When are you leaving?’” The ambassador bluntly told the Shah that “it would be best for stability in Iran if he left” and asked if he would like him to secure an invitation to enter the United States. In Sullivan’s typically acerbic retelling of their conversation the Shah “leaned forward, almost like a small boy, and said, ‘Oh would you?’” Sullivan didn’t need to be asked twice. State Department cable traffic reported that at 10:54 a.m. on Friday, January 12, Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi telephoned Walter Annenberg, the wealthy publisher of TV Guide and close friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, to let him know that the King and Queen would arrive in Palm Springs the following Thursday or Friday after making a brief stopover for several days in Egypt to visit their friends the Sadats. “Zahedi indicated that he would like the party to arrive at a nearby military base and be helicoptered to Annenberg estate,” Secretary of State Vance informed Sullivan. “At our request Annenberg is willing to receive the Shah and party of up to 15 and put them up through the first week in February and he so informed Zahedi.” The Shah’s initial plan to stay at the Beverley Hills residence of Princess Shams was scotched by security concerns after Iranian student protesters rioted outside the grounds. The Annenberg estate, by contrast, said Vance, was “completely walled and surrounded by barbed wire.” He added that State Department officials were working with the office of former vice president Nelson Rockefeller to find a second port of call once the Pahlavis left Palm Springs.
* * *
THE SHAH’S DEPARTURE announcement cast a pall over the Imperial Court. Staff and courtiers who had worked for the Pahlavis since the time of Reza Shah reacted with shock, scorn, and grief to the news that the family intended to leave Iran. “They were so upset and disillusioned,” said a senior court official. “Their morale was so low.” They feared for their livelihoods but also for their lives. At one time the envy of their friends and neighbors, now the palace’s cooks, cleaners, stable hands, guards, and gardeners were “insulted, accosted in the streets, and sometimes physically attacked” in their own neighborhoods. They were terrified they would be left to fend for themselves against the revolutionaries. “People were breaking down all over the place in the last week,” said Hossein Amir Sadighi, the son of the Shah’s chauffeur. “The Shah was suffering enormously and his aides were useless. Without the Empress it would have been impossible. She was the tower of strength. She ran things in the end.”
The Shah withdrew into himself. When he was not in audiences he watched movies, played bridge, and walked around the palace grounds. “Strolling among the larches and pines,” reported Newsweek, “the Shah at one point bent down and picked up a handful of soil. He would take it with him when he left the country—just as his father had done when he was sent into exile in 1941.” Rather than deal with his generals in person, the Shah assigned a sergeant attached to the Imperial Guard the task of conveying his wishes because he could not bear another appeal for a crackdown or petition urging him to stay in Iran. Chief of the General Staff General Abbas Gharabaghi begged Queen Farah to help change her husband’s mind. “If His Majesty leaves,” he warned, “the army won’t hold out.” Generals Badrei and Khosrodad urged her to help them persuade the Shah to remove himself to Kish so they could finish the rebellion. “I also received a delegation of members of Parliament who pleaded the same cause,” said Farah, who recalled their “panic at the thought of the King’s leaving,” and raised the idea of forming armed citizens’ militias to put down the uprising.
One of Farah’s last callers was Mansur Eqbal, one of the nephews of the late former prime minister Manuchehr Eqbal. Eqbal’s cousin was married to Princess Ashraf’s son Shahriar, who served in the Imperial Navy. The Eqbal family enjoyed close ties to the ulama—Mansur’s father, Khosrow, was custodian of the Holy Shrine of Fatima in Qom—and one of his best friends was closely connected to the Khomeini movement. Through his friend the revolutionary, Mansur learned that Khomeini planned to stage a coup with the help of Banisadr, Ghotzbadegh, and Yazdi when he returned to Iran. Eqbal passed on the tip to another cousin serving in the military, who in turn contacted Ardeshir Zahedi. Zahedi arranged for a car and driver to take Eqbal to Niavaran so he could pass on the intelligence to the King in person.
Mansur Eqbal was the Shah’s last appointment of the day when he entered his study at ten o’clock. “When I went to Niavaran I saw the guard,” he recalled. “I went in and it was empty. I went upstairs to his room and waited for a few minutes. I saw him for twenty minutes. I couldn’t take it. How a country could be destroyed like this and to see the face of the Shah, how sad he looked.” Eqbal told him about Khomeini’s plan to stage a Bolshevik-style armed insurrection once he returned home. He asked the Shah point-blank: “Do you think this is a one-way trip? Your Majesty, why don’t you accept the suggestions of Khosrodad and the others and go to Nowshahr and let them take care of this?” The Shah avoided answering his question. Instead, he said he wished Eqbal had come to see him years earlier to talk about his concerns. Why hadn’t he done so? Eqbal replied that some time ago he had sent the Shah the university thesis he had written on the problems facing Iran’s economy. He had never heard back. Though he didn’t tell the Shah, Eqbal suspected that Prime Minister Hoveyda had suppressed his report as he had filed away so many others over the years. Farah also received counselors and friends. Shahin Fatemi visited Niavaran eight times in the final weeks to offer support and to encourage the couple to stay on and fight. He knew Farah did not want to leave. “When I said I thought the Shah should stay, she would say, ‘Please tell His Majesty what you tell me.’”
The Shah and Queen were agreed on one thing: they would take their clothes and personal effects with them out of the country but otherwise leave everything else behind. The Shah’s decision was fueled by bitterness toward the people he believed had rejected him. Farah recalled her visit to the Kremlin years before and was determined not to give their critics any more ammunition. “I did not want to give them any reason to think that we had left taking our possessions with us,” she said. “No, we were leaving with our heads held high, sure of having worked ceaselessly for the benefit of the country.” The Shah pointed out a work of art on the wall in the dining room. “You liked this tableau,” he said. “I don’t want anything,” said Farah, who was so determined to prove her point that she even left behind the exquisite private collection of jewels she had purchased with her own funds. They included such treasures as her favorite turquoise tiara set with matching necklace and earrings. In the days leading up to departure loading vans were spotted inside the palace grounds taking valuable works of art and state gifts into storage in the city’s museums. Farah invited a group of foreign correspondents to tour and film the interior of the residence. “So no one will accuse us of taking things out,” she told Fatemi. He was struck by her naïveté. “You don’t know these people,” he warned.
On Monday, January 15, an Iranian C-130 military transport left Tehran with Madame Diba, Prince Ali Reza, Princess Leila, Leila’s governess, and several court officials and military officers bound for Lubbock, Texas, where the party planned to join Crown Prince Reza. The strike at the airport meant there was no catering for the flight, “no food, no water, nothing,” said Amir Pourshaja, who accompanied the party. Another passenger was Deputy Court Minister Abolfath Atabai, who twenty-five years earlier had been one of only two aides to accompany the Shah and Queen Soraya to Rome. For the second time in his life he was headed into exile.
On Monday evening the King and Queen threw a small farewell party for their dwindling circle of friends. The Shah assured everyone they would be back after a few months’ rest. Few who were present took him at his word. “On the last night I did not tell him anything,” said Reza Ghotbi. “He had decided. I didn’t have the heart to go to the airport the next day. I didn’t know if he would come back or not but I thought not.”
For Shahin Fatemi the Shah’s decision to leave Iran “was like a nightmare.” “Don’t leave, Your Majesty,” he pleaded.
“Don’t worry,” said the Shah. “We will leave and we will come back.”
“Not this time, Your Majesty,” said Fatemi. He pointed out the window to the plane trees that lined the grounds like sentinels. “If you leave Khomeini will come back and he will pray under these trees.”
* * *
IN THE DAYS leading to the Shah’s departure, Ambassador Sullivan received crucial intelligence suggesting that he might have backed the wrong horse after all. “Embassy keeps getting reports from various sources that moderate religious leaders are very concerned by situation that is likely to arise when Shah leaves the country,” Sullivan informed Washington on Wednesday, January 10, though he curtly dismissed their fears as “not very coherent or well reasoned and the motives involved are not always clear. Religious moderates are angry at Khomeini for putting them in present difficult position but do not know what to do about it.” Ayatollah Milani of Mashad, twice jailed under the Shah’s regime, still expressed the hope that “the Shah will not leave the country” and tried to open a back channel to Sullivan to beg the Americans to take action. The ambassador also reported that extremist mullahs had surrounded the house of Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari and that “religious moderates are now scared enough to talk more publicly about their fears.”
Four days later Karim Sanjabi, one of the most prominent leaders of the National Front, made a belated admission to George Lambrakis. The revolutionaries had not yet taken power but already splits were developing among the different factions. Ibrahim Yazdi and Sadegh Ghotzbadegh, he explained, were “very angry at [the] National Front. He does not know why.” Lambrakis was already aware that Khomeini nursed a deep grudge against Mossadeq’s former aides for their failure to oust the Shah in 1953 when they had a chance. “According to this theory,” said Lambrakis, “Khomeini has never forgiven Mossadegh for pleading allegiance to the Shah and serving as his prime minister when he was strong enough to oust him.” Khomeini blamed “Mossadegh and his people” for flirting with the Tudeh Party, a foolish action that he believed had provoked the United States to stage Operation Ajax. “Khomeini sees no reason to trust power to the National Front again,” he advised. Sanjabi also confessed to Lambrakis that he and Bazargan, his putative ally, were neither personally nor professionally close. Finally, Sanjabi revealed that Khomeini planned to purge the military once he returned from exile, though he tried to excuse it away as “some small trials.” Lambrakis said he hoped the Islamists were not planning anything on the scale of postwar Germany’s Nuremberg trials. He added that he shared Sanjabi’s hope that the army would hold and not stage a coup to rescue the monarchy.
American fears of a royalist coup had prompted General Huyser’s mission to Tehran, but confusion surrounded his orders. He complained to Washington that his instructions were imprecise and open to different interpretations. In an attempt to seek clarification the general cabled Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David Jones, asking for guidance. As he understood it his mission was to work with the Shah’s generals to persuade them to support Bakhtiar and discourage them from staging a coup. If, however, Bakhtiar’s government faltered, and if the Communist Tudeh Party tried to seize power, Huyser was to stand aside while the generals took action. The plan made no mention of the threat from Khomeini or the Islamists, whom the Americans assumed shared their own anti-Communist beliefs. “I have told [the generals] that I consider a military coup as an absolutely last resort,” said Huyser. “I have explained to them that there are degrees before that action.” First, they should allow Bakhtiar the opportunity to exert his authority. Second, if the internal situation worsened, Bakhtiar could declare martial law and call out the army to restore basic services, such as running the oil fields or maintaining the power grid. Only if the first and second steps failed would the United States endorse an army takeover. Huyser summed up his instructions this way: “I’ll do my best to … give full support to Bakhtiar, and not jump into a military coup.”
The revolutionaries were confident they had neutralized the possibility of U.S. military action to save the Shah. By now Khomeini’s shock troops had also eliminated his main rivals. Imam Musa Sadr had disappeared in Tripoli. Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari was a prisoner in his own home. Other moderate clerics had been silenced with death threats and intimidation. Khomeini stood on the brink of a clean sweep.
* * *
TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, was a day that began like any other. The Shah rose early, perused the morning papers over breakfast, and walked across the lawn to his office at the Jahan Nama Palace trailed by Colonel Djahinbini. He expected the Majles to give Prime Minister Bakhtiar’s government a vote of confidence later in the morning. “He really surprised me,” said Djahinbini. “He accepted a regular program of audiences. Early in the morning I checked the morning’s list of visitors. He left the residence and went to the office as usual. The last name on the list was Deputy Court Minister Baheri at eleven.” But his office staff noticed that the Shah was more subdued than usual. “Where is your smile, Your Majesty?” one greeted him. He wearily responded, “I haven’t been able to smile much for a long time now.”
Queen Farah spent the morning packing up family photo albums, choosing favorite books from her library, and taking souvenirs for the children. “We are leaving,” she telephoned her friend Fereydoun Djavadi. “God knows what will happen.” Word of the couple’s departure quickly spread to the staff, who gathered in small, tearful knots in the grand hall. The atmosphere was one of grief, shock, and despair. “I could feel the distress in the men and women of our staff,” said Farah. She came out to greet them and presented each with a small memento or money in the traditional manner. “Around eleven His Majesty came out of his office and walked up to the residence,” said Djahinbini. “Her Majesty came out, they talked and stood before the staff and some family friends.” The sight of the Shah brought everyone to tears. “They gathered around the King and Queen, shouting and kissing their hands and feet,” said Djahinbini. The Shah tried to calm them. “No reason to worry,” he said. “We are leaving for a long-needed rest and shall soon return.”
Outside the sky darkened, the temperature plummeted, and the wind whipped up. The King and Queen walked out of the residence for the last time accompanied by several hundred men and women who spontaneously lined the driveway leading to the top lawn, where the helicopters were loaded and ready for the short flight to Mehrebad. Men and women who had known the Shah since he was a young boy, or who had been with the Queen since she arrived from Paris as a young bride, fell to their knees and crumpled to the ground. Others stood frozen like stone. The air rang with sobs and shrieks. “Where are you going?” they wept. “When will you be coming back? Why are you leaving us? We feel abandoned like orphans, orphans.” The Shah and Queen struggled to contain their own emotions and comforted them. “Please get up,” they pleaded. “Trust in God. We will be back.… Hands were stretched out to us. I can still see faces twisted with emotion,” remembered Farah. The Shah walked toward his helicopter and turned and gave the crowd a final parting wave before boarding the craft with Colonel Djahinbini, General Badrei, and Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar. Farah embraced her tearful attendants and took her seat in the second helicopter. The final liftoff was excruciating. “With the sound of the whirring rotors in my ears,” said Farah, “I soon saw the palace disappear behind the buildings of Tehran.”
For the next ten minutes the choppers and their escorts clattered high above the streets of Tehran, which for a change were quiet. Each passenger was lost in his or her thoughts. “No one said anything,” said Djahinbini. They set down alongside Mehrebad Airport’s Imperial Pavilion, where only a few months earlier the Pahlavis had welcomed President Scheel of West Germany. The Shah could barely stand the strain and made it clear he was anxious to leave. He asked someone to call the Majles to get a progress report on the parliamentary vote of confidence and was told the phone lines had been cut. The only sound, Farah recalled, “was the whining of the wind coming down from the Alborz Mountains.” Djahinbini watched as Chief of the General Staff General Abbas Gharabaghi asked the Shan to sign a decree handing over control of the army while he was out of the country. “His Majesty didn’t sign it,” said the colonel. “He told Gharabaghi twice—the General tried one more time—that if you want something signed take it to the government. This was highly unusual. It had never happened before. Before, he had always signed such a decree.” The Shah told the few journalists at the scene that he was unsure when he would return. “It depends on the status of my health and I cannot define the time.” Farah, “trying to keep her emotions under control,” added, “I’m sure that the independence and national unity of our country will be preserved. I have faith in the Iranian people and in the culture of Iran. May God bless and preserve the Iranian nation.”
After what seemed an interminable wait, Prime Minister Bakhtiar’s helicopter came into view. He strode into the pavilion with the news they had been waiting for. The Shah and Bakhtiar conferred in private for a few minutes and then the Shah left the pavilion with his wife on his arm and walked toward the Shahine. For the first time in his reign there was no departure ceremony, no diplomatic corps, “no honor guard for him to review, no national anthem to herald his presence.” The Shah kept his composure until General Badrei burst into tears and knelt before him and grabbed his shoes, causing him to tearfully try to raise the general off the tarmac. Before boarding the aircraft the Pahlavis walked under a copy of the Quran “with tears in their eyes and kissed the holy book before boarding the royal aircraft.”
Prime Minister Bakhtiar joined the couple in their forward compartment for a few last words. “You now have all the power and authority,” the Shah told him. “I leave the country in your hands and with God.” Bakhtiar kissed his hand and left the aircraft. He stood on the tarmac and watched as the Shahine with the Shah at the controls roared down the runway for the last time. At 1:24 p.m. the wheels lifted off and the silver and blue bird set course for Egypt.
On the streets below, American lawyer John Westberg was returning from lunch with a colleague “when we began to hear horns honking and noticed cars putting their lights on. As we walked back to the office, people were coming into the street with big smiles on their faces. One fellow noticing us looking perplexed said: ‘Mister, Shah raft [is gone]!’ So we knew it had happened. Back at the office, everyone was at the windows watching the people in the streets milling around and shouting. Soon cars were honking all over the place and the streets were jammed. People filled the streets on all sides of our building. The celebration was joyous and a little wild. It was a bit frightening.”
Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Afshar summed up the degrading spectacle of the Shah’s departure this way: “It needs a Shakespeare to do justice to what the Iranians did to their sovereign on his last day in his country.”
* * *
THE END CAME quickly in a paroxysm of violence and bloodshed.
Grand Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran on Thursday, February 1, 1979, and was greeted by hundreds of thousands of ecstatic supporters. “Khomeini’s flight from Paris to Tehran was for many of his followers like the Prophet Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622,” wrote his biographer Baqer Moin. “In the new vocabulary developed by the Islamists, Khomeini was ‘prophet-like,’ the man who ‘brought to an end the age of ignorance and introduced the light of Islam.’” Teeming crowds jammed the eleven-mile route from the airport into the center of Tehran. Khomeini did not return the sentiment. Asked what emotions he felt on seeing his homeland for the first time in fourteen years, he batted away his questioner with a single word. “None!” he snapped. When he emerged from the Air France flight he did not speak of reconciliation and unity but of revenge and the need for blood. He said he held foreigners and especially Americans responsible for Iran’s ills. “Our final victory will come when all foreigners are out of the country,” he told his followers. “I beg God to cut off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers.”
The very next day, National Security Adviser Brzezinski sought to assure President Carter that the tumult playing out in Iran was an isolated episode. “We should be careful not to over-generalize from the Iranian case,” he explained, underlining two sentences for emphasis. “Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future.”
Eight days later, on February 10, the armed coup that Mansur Eqbal had predicted came to pass when young Islamist air force technicians staged a revolt at their base in eastern Tehran and turned their weapons on their comrades and officers. Their rebellion was the signal for the armed insurrection that the Mujahedin and Fedayeen had been planning for the past two years. The machine guns, rifles, and explosives they had stockpiled in mosque basements around Tehran were quickly handed out to militias, whose gunmen turned the streets of Tehran into a free fire zone. The ministries, palaces, and national broadcasting headquarters were quickly seized. The Shah’s senior officers held a meeting and debated what to do, but General Gharabaghi vetoed the idea of staging a rebellion when he declared the army’s neutrality. Twenty-four hours later, Tehran fell to the revolutionaries, and the revolutionaries declared final victory over the Shah.
* * *
RETRIBUTION WAS SWIFT under Iran’s new Islamic regime. The names of the many hundreds sent to the firing squads in the first eighteen months of the Islamic republic’s existence read like a “who’s who” of Imperial Iran. The rooftop of the school used by Khomeini as a temporary headquarters doubled as an execution chamber, and the crème of the Shah’s officer corps was eliminated, though not in the way William Sullivan had been led to expect. Among the high-ranking former officers and officials sent to the firing squad in the blood-soaked first weeks:
General Nematollah Nasiri, former chief of Savak.
General Manuchehr Khosrodad, commander of the air corps.
General Amir Rahimi, former martial law administrator of Tehran.
General Reza Naji, former military governor of Isfahan.
General Nasser Moghadam, successor to Nasiri as chief of Savak.
General Hassan Pakravan, the former head of Savak who had intervened in 1963 to persuade the Shah to spare Khomeini’s life. In their last days alive Pakravan and Moghadam shared the same prison cell. Moghadam told Pakravan that he was confident he would be spared. He admitted that before the Shah left Iran he had reached a secret agreement with Khomeini’s men to help neutralize Savak and provide them with inside information, including the names of top clergy who collaborated with the regime. “I am helping them to establish a new intelligence service and nothing will happen to me,” he assured Pakravan. “Be careful,” the general told his cellmate. “You don’t know the mullahs.” The other prisoners told Pakravan he would be spared. “General, you saved the life of Khomeini,” they reminded him. Pakravan knew better. “He will execute me because he knows I know a lot about him.” He was right—both men went to their deaths before the firing squad.
General Parviz Amini-Afshar, head of G2 Military Intelligence and commander of the Imperial Chief of Staff.
General Amir-Hossein Rabii, commander of the Imperial Air Force.
General Ali Neshat, commander of the Immortals.
General Nader Djahanbani, deputy commander of the Imperial Air Force, the handsome “blue-eyed general” whose brother Khosrow was married to Princess Shahnaz.
By the time former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda was brought to trial the revolutionaries had abolished the monarchy and established Iran as an Islamic republic. During this time the prisons were packed with thousands of people suspected of ties to the Pahlavi regime. Press reports spoke of upwards of ten thousand who had “disappeared.”
Hoveyda was held in brutal conditions and tried for “crimes against the people” in a circus atmosphere that caused widespread outrage inside and outside Iran. Over the protests of Mehdi Bazargan and Karim Sanjabi, the courtly former prime minister and court minister was executed along with six military officers at 6:00 p.m. on April 7 by young volunteers who enthusiastically blasted them with Israeli-made Uzi machine guns.
Other prominent civilian officials put to death included:
Manuchehr Azmun, the former minister of labor and minister of state for executive affairs who oversaw the disastrous handling of September’s martial law announcement.
Gholam Reza Nikpey, former mayor of Tehran.
Mahmud Jaafarian, Reza Ghotbi’s successor as head of the national broadcasting service.
* * *
IMAM MUSA SADR was never seen alive again. According to Palestinian sources who tipped off the CIA, in the spring of 1979 Colonel Gadhafi telephoned Ayatollah Beheshti and asked what he wanted to do with his “guest.” Beheshti reportedly told Gadhafi that “Musa Sadr is a threat to Khomeini.” The Americans later learned that Musa Sadr and his two traveling companions had been “summarily executed and buried at an unmarked desert gravesite.”
Following the overthrow of Colonel Gadhafi in 2011 a former top aide came forward to reveal that the Imam had survived his imprisonment well into the late 1990s. Hopes were briefly raised that Musa Sadr’s family and followers would finally learn the truth about his disappearance. Following his election to the Iranian presidency in 2013, Hassan Rouhani pledged to undertake a new investigation to find out the truth about Musa Sadr’s disappearance. Libya’s descent into civil war soon provided Rouhani with a convenient excuse not to act. If Shia Muslims ever learned the truth about the disappearance of their beloved “Missing Imam”—that he had actually sided with the Shah against Khomeini in 1978 and that the founders of the Islamic republic were complicit in his murder—the tremors would be felt from Najaf to Qom.
* * *
GRAND AYATOLLAH MOHAMMAD Kazem Shariatmadari refused to accept his rival Khomeini’s claim to rule Iran and denounced velayat-e faqih or “guardianship of the jurists.” He opposed the referendum to abolish the monarchy, protested the seizure of U.S. diplomats in November 1979, and bitterly attacked Khomeini’s regime as a totalitarian fraud. Khomeini placed him under house arrest, and members of the Marja’s family were arrested and tortured by the secret police. These actions led to a brief popular revolt in Tabriz. Shariatmadari was later accused of complicity in an abortive coup attempt and on Khomeini’s orders Iran’s most senior marja was sensationally stripped of his black turban and beaten by thugs. In a final act of vengeance, Khomeini deprived Shariatmadari of the life-saving drugs he needed to treat cancer. Kazem Shariatmadari was living under house arrest when he died in obscurity in 1986.
* * *
ON MARCH 20, 1979, the CIA quietly announced that it had translated and published a seventy-four-page book that it gave the innocuous title Translations on Near East and North Africa, No. 1897. Nine years overdue, the agency had finally published Islamic Government, Khomeini’s blueprint for the establishment of an Islamic republic and the expulsion of U.S. influence from Iran.
* * *
GRAND AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH Khomeini assumed the mantle of Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic and ruled Iran with an iron fist until his death in 1989. Sharia became the law of the land, tight censorship was imposed, and no independent political activity was tolerated. “Prison life was drastically worse under the Islamic Republic than under the Pahlavis,” observed Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian. “One who survived both writes that four months under [Khomeini] took the toll of four years under Savak. Another writes that one day under the former equaled ten years under the latter.… In the prison literature of the Pahlavi period, the recurring words had been ‘boredom’ and ‘monotony.’ In that of the Islamic republic they were ‘fear,’ ‘death,’ ‘terror,’ ‘horror,’ and, most frequent of all, ‘nightmare.’”
In a bizarre historical twist, Khomeini and his coterie fulfilled the litany of crimes they had laid at the Shah’s feet. Royalists, leftists, liberals, homosexuals, Jews, Baha’i, and Freemasons were severely repressed. An estimated eight thousand Iranians were put to death for political “crimes” during the four-year period from 1981 to 1985, and in total twelve thousand Iranians were reportedly killed by the Islamic republic during Khomeini’s decade in power. Under Khomeini, prison space more than doubled and torture practices banned by the Shah were reinstated. The single deadliest atrocity occurred in July 1988, when an estimated three thousand young men and women accused of holding leftist political views were slain in a single week. In the 1990s a number of prominent Iranian intellectuals were murdered in their homes by regime death squads. In 2009 several hundred pro-democracy protesters were massacred and hundreds more tortured when they protested the rigged election that returned Mahmud Ahmadinejad to power. In addition, about a million Iranians and Iraqis perished during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war fought from 1980 to 1988. During the revolution, Saddam Hussein had presciently warned Queen Farah that “it is better that a thousand Iranians die now than a million people die later.”
The men who brought Khomeini to power were consumed in the inferno.
Mehdi Bazargan served as Khomeini’s first prime minister and resigned in November 1979 to protest the seizure of the American embassy compound in Tehran. Bazargan died in exile in Switzerland in 1995 at age eighty-six.
Abolhassan Banisadr was elected the first president of the Islamic Republic in 1981. He clashed with Khomeini, who suspected his populism and his leftist pretensions. Impeached by the Iranian parliament in 1981, Banisadr made a dramatic escape to France. He lives in exile in France and now resides in a château in Versailles, the seat of the French kings.
Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti served as chairman of the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for selecting Khomeini’s putative successor, and emerged as kingmaker in the new republic. In June 1981 he was blown up along with seventy-one other senior officials in a blast reportedly carried out by the Mujahedin, which had declared war on the Islamists. To this day many Iranians suspect he was actually assassinated by jealous rivals within the regime.
Sadegh Ghotzbadegh served as Iran’s foreign minister and handled the negotiations to release the American diplomats seized when student radicals stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979. In April 1982 he was arrested and accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Imprisoned and tortured, Ghotzbadegh was executed in September 1982.
Ibrahim Yazdi served in Bazargan’s government but resigned with him to protest the takeover of the U.S. embassy in November 1979. He assumed the leadership of the Liberation Movement and emerged as a critic of Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. His house was firebombed and he was arrested and rearrested, most recently during the 2009 upheavals.
* * *
THE ARCHTRAITOR HOSSEIN Fardust, the Shah’s friend and aide since childhood, was one of the few pillars of the ancien régime who stayed in Iran after the revolution and was not consigned to the firing squad. As penance for his service to the Pahlavi Dynasty, Fardust wrote a scurrilous memoir that accused the Shah of corruption, brutality, sexual deviancy, and treasonous dealings with foreign governments. Fardust played to Iranian paranoia about British influence in Iran when he “revealed” that the secret brains behind Savak’s special intelligence branch was actually the “satanic” Queen Elizabeth II. The Shah, wrote Fardust, used to meet each day with the head of British intelligence’s Tehran office to receive his instructions. It was unclear whether Fardust wrote the book on his own initiative or acted under duress. He died in 1987 shortly after giving his first television interview.
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THE FALL OF the Shah led to a great deal of soul-searching and not a little retribution in Washington, where President Carter and his top officials were accused of failing to support an ally in his hour of need. Carter’s election defeat in November 1980 was blamed in large part on his handling of the revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. Carter went on to found the Carter Center to advance democracy and human rights and alleviate conflict, poverty, and disease. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002.
Today, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski teaches American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, and is a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the nation’s capital. He continues to speak out on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations and supported the 2015 U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.
Ambassador William Sullivan left Tehran in 1979 and retired from the State Department to accept a post at Columbia University as head of the American Assembly. Sullivan, who died in October 2013 at age ninety, never fully explained the logic behind his support for Khomeini’s return, and his memoir Mission to Iran left many unanswered questions.
Charlie Naas, Sullivan’s deputy, is today retired and living outside Washington, DC. He still closely follows events in Iran.
Henry Precht was blamed by many White House officials and members of Congress for mishandling the State Department’s response to the revolution. Congressional opposition ended his chances of securing an ambassadorship. He remains an unrepentant critic of the Shah.
George Lambrakis is retired and living in Paris.
John Stempel recently retired after twenty-six years as administrator and teacher at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. He recalled the events surrounding the Shah’s downfall in his book Inside the Iranian Revolution.
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THE PAHLAVIS’ FRIENDS and courtiers scattered after the revolution.
Elli Antoniades settled in New York, later retired to Athens, Greece, and maintains her close friendship with Queen Farah.
Amir Pourshaja, the late Shah’s valet, lives with his family in Maryland.
Reza Ghotbi lives in Maryland and works as an IT consultant.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a professor in Islamic Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and has authored and edited fifty books. In later years, Nasr tried to distance himself from Queen Farah and in interviews with the Iranian press expressed regret at his decision to head her office in the final months of 1978. He is the father of Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a prominent expert on Iran and U.S.-Iran relations.
Ardeshir Zahedi retired to Switzerland and has completed his volumes of memoirs. He continues to speak out about the Pahlavi era and U.S.-Iran relations.
Parviz Sabeti, who urged the Shah to crack down against Khomeini in the spring of 1978, lives in the United States.
Ali Kani, the friend to Imam Musa Sadr who conveyed Khomeini’s Islamic Government thesis to the Shah, settled in exile in France.
Colonel Kiomars Djahinbini, the Shah’s faithful head of security, lives in Virginia with his family.
Fereydoun Djavadi, friend to Queen Farah, lives in Paris.
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OF THE SHAH’S surviving brothers and sisters, Princess Ashraf and Prince Gholam Reza moved to France. After the revolution the Princess became a vocal opponent of the Khomeini regime and wrote two books, Faces in a Mirror and Time for Truth, about her life and the revolution that deposed her beloved brother and destroyed the Pahlavi Dynasty. She died on January 7, 2016.
Pahlavi family matriarch Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk died of cancer in 1982.
Former Queen Fawzia, the Shah’s first wife and the mother of Princess Shahnaz, died in Alexandria, Egypt, on July 2, 2013, at age ninety-one.
Former Queen Soraya, the Shah’s second wife and the woman he divorced to sire an heir, died in Paris on September 26, 2001, at age sixty-nine.
Khosrow Djahanbani, scion of the powerful and wealthy Djahanbani Dynasty, whose brother Nader was executed by Khomeini’s men, died in 2014. He supported the goals of the revolution to the end and never recanted his support for the man responsible for overthrowing his father-in-law and killing his brother.
Princess Shahnaz followed her husband’s lead when after the revolution she took an Islamic name and rejected her Pahlavi heritage. After Khosrow’s death, however, Shahnaz insisted on being addressed as the King’s daughter and a member of the Imperial House. Now unveiled, she lives quietly in Switzerland.
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THE SHAH WAS pursued to the ends of the earth by his mortal enemy Khomeini, who never let him rest. He and the Queen were condemned by the new rulers of the Islamic Republic as the “corrupt on earth,” sentenced to death in absentia, and hunted by trained assassins. Gunmen sent from Tehran successfully eliminated the three men considered most capable of leading organized resistance to the Islamist regime. General Oveissi and Prince Shahriar, Princess Ashraf’s naval commander son, were both shot in Paris in 1980 in separate attacks. Former prime minister Shahpur Bakhtiar and his assistant had their throats cut by armed intruders who made their way into Bakhtiar’s heavily secured Paris apartment.
The Shah, Queen Farah, and their youngest children and entourage left Cairo after a short stay and flew to Morocco as guests of King Hassan. They were in Morocco in February 1979 when the monarchy was finally overthrown. The new Islamic republic promised to cut oil sales and relations with any country that offered them safe haven, and many of the princes, presidents, and prime ministers who once called at Niavaran looking for favors turned their backs on them. Old friends such as Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, and the Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish royal families stayed in touch but lacked the political power to extend practical help. The family moved to the Bahamas and Mexico before President Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah to enter the United States for cancer surgery. His decision prompted the student takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. From New York the Pahlavis spent time in Panama before returning to the Middle East. President Sadat welcomed the Shah back to Egypt, where he died on July 27, 1980.
In the months before he succumbed to lymphoma the Shah spoke more freely than at any time in his life. He held a series of revealing conversations with his wife’s friend Fereydoun Djavadi. “Why didn’t you go all out against Khomeini?” Djavadi asked him. “Why didn’t you finish this?” “I wasn’t this man,” the Shah answered. “If you wanted someone to kill people you had to find somebody else.” Djavadi was perplexed. He reminded the Shah that he had ordered the army crackdown in 1963. “You gave the orders to finish the job,” said Djavadi. “It wasn’t me,” the Shah told him. “It was Alam who gave the orders.”
The Shah spoke often about fate and destiny. In the space of a few decades he had transformed a backward, poverty-stricken country into southwestern Asia’s most powerful state and the world’s second-largest oil producer. The Iran he left behind boasted one of the best-educated workforces in the Middle East and a burgeoning manufacturing and industrial base. Despite the economic dislocations caused by the oil boom, in his last year the economy had finally started to cool off and settle down. Iran under his watch experienced one of the greatest artistic and cultural revivals in its modern history, and the country was on its way to becoming a regional hub for industry, science, and medicine. He had hoped that his farewell gift to Iran would be free elections, a return to democracy, and the handover of the crown to his eldest son. Like his father, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had simply run out of time and luck. “I hadn’t the time,” he mused. “If I had five more years everything would be done.”
The Shah was in Cairo when Djavadi asked him to describe his feelings about Iran and the Iranian people. “Your Majesty, you’re in love with Iran,” said Djavadi. “Can you define what is Iran?”
The Shah, for whom nationalism was like a religion, paused to consider his answer. “Iran is Iran,” he soberly replied. There followed a minute’s silence. “It’s land, people, and history,” he added. Another minute passed. “Every Iranian has to love it.” He repeated over and over: “Iran is Iran. Iran is Iran.”
Shortly thereafter he slipped into unconsciousness and passed away. He was sixty years old, an age when many statesmen in Western countries were winning their first elections to national office.
One thing he knew for sure. Though the glory days of empire might be over, the claim to past greatness ran through the land and the people like a pulse.