I am going to go faster than the left.
—THE SHAH
I can summon a million martyrs to any cause.
—AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI
The chief beneficiary of unrest in the early 1960s was born in the village of Khomein in central Iran on September 24, 1902. Ruhollah Khomeini was raised in a walled compound in comfortable surroundings and attended by servants and guards. His family claimed descent from the seventh of Mohammad’s twelve imams or disciples and were entitled to style themselves as seyyeds or direct descendants of the Prophet. Seyyeds wore black turbans and enjoyed considerable prestige in society. The Khomeini family had emigrated from Persia to British-ruled India in the early seventeenth century and lived among Shia Muslims in a small town near Lucknow. Their descendant Ahmad Khomeini returned to Persia in 1834 and established himself as a prosperous landowner. His son Mostafa trained as a religious scholar, and the third of his six children, Ruhollah, was only four months old when his father was slain in an ambush by a local warlord. The boy’s childhood coincided with the upheavals of the Constitutional Revolution, civil war, and British-Russian colonial intervention. The Persian countryside was a dangerous, lawless place, and from an early age young Ruhollah showed signs of the remarkable fortitude that defined him as a man. “He was a particularly striking boy of above average build,” wrote his biographer Baqer Moin. “Even as a youngster,” one of Khomeini’s sons later recalled, “my father always wanted to be the Shah in the games he played.”
He studied religion in Qom, earned his credentials as a religious scholar or mutjahid, and worked as a teacher. His ambition showed in his choice of bride—fifteen-year-old Qodsi was the daughter of a respected Tehran clergyman. “The qualities of autocracy, decisiveness and self-righteousness that were to stand him in such good stead in his later political career were already well ingrained in Khomeini the young teacher,” wrote Moin. Khomeini showed no tolerance for classroom debate, still less for compromise in his personal and professional relationships. By age forty he had established a reputation as a critic of Reza Shah’s secular state, though he still favored the monarchy over a republic. But Khomeini’s impatience revealed itself in publications he authored that called for more religion in public life and the return of the clergy to politics. He became a follower of Ayatollah Kashani, the Shiite firebrand who inspired the Fedayeen-e Islam terror group and later betrayed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. Though few knew it at the time, Khomeini also opposed Mossadeq for “pledging allegiance to the Shah and serving as his prime minister when he was strong enough to oust him.” He similarly distrusted the National Front for entering into a political alliance with the Tudeh Party, which preached atheist values. Many years later, after Khomeini emerged as the most vociferous of the Shah’s critics, Ardeshir Zahedi, who had played a vital role during Operation Ajax as courier between the coup plotters and sympathetic ulama, said he thought the older man’s face looked familiar. “I can’t be completely sure but I remember seeing that person at Kashani’s house.”
In the late 1950s Khomeini drew overflowing crowds to a hall where he staked out a position to the right of Shiism’s theological divide between constitutionalists and rejectionists. Where other clerics conveyed their thoughts in flowery, arcane seminary language, Khomeini’s sermons and speeches had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer striking plate glass; he instinctively understood that in Iran the path to power lay in the gutter. His talents attracted the attention of the security forces, who infiltrated his household with informers, but Khomeini’s restlessness also drew the scrutiny of Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi, the paramount figure within Shiism, who resided in Najaf in Iraq. The city of Najaf was home to some of the holiest sites in Islam and competed with Qom as a major center of theological training for young Iranian seminarians. Borujerdi represented the “quietist” majority of clergy who considered themselves monarchists in the spirit of the 1906 Constitution. Despite their reservations about the Pahlavis, who championed pre-Islamic traditions and supported Western-style modernity, the ulama followed Borujerdi’s lead and refused to soil themselves in political life. Borujerdi was so adamant on this issue that he once employed club-wielding mobs to forcibly expel the Fedayeen-e from Qom. Khomeini’s reputation as a firebrand and his close association with Fedayeen-e Islam were well known, but so long as Borujerdi was alive he felt duty-bound to respect the old man’s wishes and stay out of the political fray.
Yet time was on Khomeini’s side. The advent of modern communications and transport links meant religious edicts sent from Qom could be wired or telephoned to different parts of the country on the same day. More than his older colleagues, the Ayatollah understood the potential this allowed for closer coordination between like-minded groups and clergy even though they might live hundreds of miles apart.
* * *
THE CITY OF Qom was saving itself for the next world. The clocks were set back ninety minutes behind Iran standard time. The preferred spoken language was not Persian but classical Arabic, the language of the Quran. Females over age four wore chadors. “There are, of course, no bars or liquor shops,” wrote one British visitor to Qom. “There are no cinemas (one was built but was almost immediately burned by an angry mob). Television is discouraged as are swimming pools, music, and musical instruments. The bookshops have little but religious literature, including numerous anti-Semitic tracts.… When the wind whips down the narrow streets and alleys, catching the black cloth of the chadors, the women resemble giant crows.” Shops in Qom displayed stylized images of the Twelfth or “Missing Imam” rather than photographs of the Shah. Most Tehranis preferred to drive around rather than through the forbidding little town, where foreigners were shushed away and uncovered women were pelted with stones. Tehranis retaliated by spreading gossip that behind closed doors in Qom “everything goes on. Vodka, poker, opium smoking.… There is a secret cinema, there are prostitutes.”
The death of Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi in March 1961 created an opportunity for the Shah to ensure that the next generation of clerical leadership in Qom stayed in loyalist hands. Though outwardly hierarchical, Shiism was a remarkably fluid and democratic faith. Mullahs, the equivalent of parish priests, occupied the lowest rung on the clerical ladder. Above them were the mutjahids, or scholars of religious law. If a mutjahid showed enough talent he might one day graduate to become an ayatollah, or bishop of the church. Ayatollahs taught and interpreted religious law for the faithful. Very few ayatollahs ever reached the elevated status of a grand ayatollah or cardinal of the faith, and fewer still reached the apex of the clerical pyramid to become a marja. It was often said that marjas were accepted and not elected by the people. Although a marja had to first become a grand ayatollah, not every grand ayatollah embodied the qualities to become a marja, and the process by which a grand ayatollah became a marja was solely determined by the number of people who decided to follow or emulate his personal interpretation of religious law and apply it in daily life. As a declaration of loyalty the people paid a religious tax or khoms, which entitled their marja to 20 percent of their income or wealth. Their local mullah took his own cut. “Of the money and goods donated by the faithful,” reported an observer, “the mullah is allowed to keep a third to support himself, his family, and his own particular projects, but he must distribute the rest to religious institutions and charities. He makes extra money through gratuities when he performs such religious ceremonies as memorial services for the dead. He is also paid for lectures on religious subjects.” Though brilliant scholarship was essential to make the leap to marja status, other factors such as personality, politics, and chance played their parts in determining the outcome of Shiism’s equivalent of a popularity contest, with prize winnings of millions of fans and hundreds of millions of dollars.
With his following, money, and moral influence, a marja enjoyed a stature most kings and prime ministers could only dream of. His position was strengthened by the fact that there were usually only three to five marjas alive at any one time. But the marjas had to take care not to grow complacent. Their followers were free to switch support from one to another at any time, and so established marjas were wary of any newcomer who showed himself capable of drawing a decent crowd for fear of losing their revenue base. Nor were their followers obliged to emulate a grand ayatollah who resided in Iran—millions of Iranians considered themselves loyal to marjas who resided in the holy cities of Iraq. The fluid nature of the marja system posed real challenges for the incumbents but especially for Iran’s kings, who kept a wary eye on these religious barons capable of mobilizing their admirers and living independent of the state. Marjas were immune from prosecution and in every respect considered above the law of the land. The greatest fear of any shah was that a marja would send the signal to his followers to come out onto the streets and enter the political arena. The last time this had happened was in 1906, when the country was swept by revolution; at that time the ulama had successfully forced the Qajar Shah to relinquish his monopoly on power. The greatest fear of the ulama, on the other hand, was the Pahlavi state’s emphasis on secularism and state power. Every time public interest in religion waned, the decline in mosque attendance meant fewer followers and a sharp drop in their income.
Though each marja was technically equal to the others, it also happened that one among them enjoyed more moral authority than his colleagues. By a quirk of tradition, exactly who that was depended on the wishes of the monarch. When Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi died the Shah, as Custodian of the Faith, wrote his letter of condolence to the ulama. Whomever among the surviving marjas received the letter was allowed to claim the exalted status of paramount marja. In 1961 the Shah was anxious not to strengthen the hand of any of the marjas living inside Iran. So he sent his letter of condolence to Grand Ayatollah Mohsen Hakim, who, like his predecessor, lived in Najaf and was firmly opposed to clerical involvement in politics. By now the Shah was determined to proceed with radical social reforms that he knew would anger the clergy.
Since childhood the Shah had dreamed of ushering in an era of social justice in the tradition of the Shia imams. Madame Arfa’s nursery lessons had not been lost on him—kings could be revolutionaries, too. “If there is to be a revolution in this country,” he said, “I will be the one to lead it.” He believed he had survived illness, the plane crash, and an assassination attempt for a reason. “I concluded that my destiny had already been designed and ordered by God,” he said. “And I must carry it out.” Self-preservation was also a factor in his decision. Five years earlier, King Faisal II of Iraq had been butchered in his palace by renegade colonels. The Shah was determined to avoid his fate by placing Iran’s monarchy not only on the side of social progress but also at the forefront. “I am going to show that revolutions to advance the poor and underprivileged can come from kings and are not the exclusive field of Marxists or socialist-minded young colonels,” he explained. “I am going to go faster than the left.” His Swiss education had convinced him that feudal societies could be reshaped by theories and policies that redistributed income and strengthened the reach of government. But the Shah’s fascination with state activism went very much against the grain of the Iranian experience. Historically, though most Iranians revered the monarchy, and held the king above politics, they viewed government as predatory, corrupt, and oppressive. The idea that government would have a more forceful presence in their lives caused ripples of discontent that spread beyond clerical circles.
With Hakim now the titular head of the clergy, the Shah decided the time was right to unveil the reforms he dubbed the “White Revolution” and that he hoped would transform Iran from a semifeudal to a modern industrial state in a generation. The White Revolution included land reform; granting women the vote; nationalizing forests; selling shares in government-owned factories to the public; profit sharing for factory workers; and establishing a literacy corps composed of army conscripts whose job would be to bring education to the provinces. Though landowners were promised compensation to surrender their estates they also lost their political clout. The ulama would also have to surrender their landholdings. There was no doubt that both groups would resist this landmark attempt to sweep away their privileges and prerogatives.
To manage the reform process, in July 1962 the Shah turned to an old friend and confederate, Asadollah Alam, a prominent landowner and aristocrat from eastern Iran whose climb to the pinnacle of power began in 1945, when he was appointed governor of Sistan and Baluchistan. Five years later, Alam received his first cabinet appointment. During the showdown against Mossadeq he had rallied to the Shah’s side, and though a hardheaded realist when it came to politics he held a romantic, almost feudal attachment to the Crown. In marked contrast to the rest of the political establishment, Alam flattered the Shah’s pretensions to rule as well as reign. In appointing Alam as his new prime minister, the Shah chose wisely and with foresight. Alam and the Shah understood that the White Revolution faced defeat if left in the hands of the conservative-dominated Majles. They decided to bypass the legislature altogether and take their plans to the country in the form of a nationwide referendum. The government’s announcement of the referendum in January 1963 caused disquiet in Qom but no immediate unrest—Grand Ayatollah Hakim was hundreds of miles away in Najaf, and the other marjas followed their usual policy of neutrality. Their silence appalled Ruhollah Khomeini, who felt obliged to vent his outrage at the Pahlavi assault on tradition and heritage. The radicals were angered by land reform but above all by women’s rights. “The son of Reza Khan has embarked on the destruction of Islam in Iran,” he thundered. “I will oppose this as long as the blood circulates in my veins.”
Everyone understood that with Ayatollah Khomeini’s entry into the political arena an important taboo had been broken. Wealthy merchants angered by the government’s economic policies donated generously to Khomeini’s cause. Left-wing students and intellectuals rallied to the side of the first public figure since Mossadeq to challenge royal prerogatives. In other circumstances they would have welcomed the Shah’s efforts to improve the lives of the rural and urban poor. But the opportunity to use an ayatollah as a battering ram against the king who had deposed their hero a decade earlier was too tempting an opportunity to pass up. The political class was mesmerized by Khomeini’s ability to fill the streets with supporters who displayed a fanatical level of devotion. “If you give the order we are prepared to attach bombs to ourselves and throw ourselves at the Shah’s car to blow him up,” one local merchant told the Ayatollah. “It won’t come to that,” Khomeini answered him. “[When] you come here, if there is something to be done, you will be asked to do it.” Out of this feverish atmosphere emerged the Coalition of Islamic Societies, an underground organization that formed the nucleus of a religious revolutionary movement. Established and led by a secret cell made up of Khomeini’s most devoted seminary students, the coalition raised money, spread propaganda, and organized other underground groups within the hawza, the network of seminaries in Qom. They endorsed assassination as a political tactic and collected money from the bazaaris (merchants).
One of the coalition’s most aggressive strategies was to smear the Shah as an apostate or nonbeliever. The allegation appeared absurd on its face—the Custodian of the Faith’s piety was well known to his family and friends. He carried a miniature copy of the Quran in his suit jacket pocket and made frequent references to his faith in speeches and interviews. His childhood visions of the imams were a matter of public record. Each time he left the country to travel overseas, the senior Muslim cleric in Tehran joined him at the airport, put his hand on his shoulder, and recited a special verse of the Quran to wish him a safe journey. Yet as a prince educated in Switzerland and trained to think logically, the Shah followed the Enlightenment rule that called for strict separation between church and state. He refused to accept the supremacy of religious over secular law and dismissed out of hand the 1906 Constitution’s guarantee of a clerical veto over parliamentary legislation. Shyness and emotional reserve played their parts, too. The Shah was uncomfortable with public displays of piety, which he viewed as another sort of demagoguery. His reticence set him apart from his own people, who reveled in passionate and very public displays of faith. Shia mosques were at the very center of neighborhood life in most Iranian villages and towns. He did not attend Friday prayers, nor did he observe fasting during the month that marked observance of Ramadan. In his thirty-seven years on the throne, the only time the faithful saw their king make his devotions was during his highly publicized annual trip to the holy city of Mashad and his attendance at ceremonies in a Tehran mosque to mark the Ashura holiday. Niavaran was the first palace since Achaemenid times not to include its own house of worship.
The Shah’s visible discomfort with public displays of piety and his disregard for Islamic symbolism stood in marked contrast to the behavior of the Arab world’s Sunni kings. The reigning monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia were not necessarily more religious than their Iranian brother, but they made a great show of attending the Friday prayers read out in their name. In so doing they retained a feel for the street and a connection to the mosque that their brother king in Iran did not have.
* * *
“EVEN IN THE womb I was a revolutionary,” Abolhassan Banisadr once said, beaming with pride. Thirty years earlier, in March 1933, Banisadr’s father, the prominent cleric Ayatollah Nasrollah Banisadr, had left the city of Hamadan with his pregnant wife to deliver a statement of political protest against Reza Shah. The Shah had recently renegotiated the terms of Britain’s monopoly of Iranian oil production and appealed to the ulama for support. But rather than send the obligatory telegram of congratulations, Banisadr chose to snub the King by making an excuse to leave his home in the city of Hamadan. Husband and wife reached a village on the outskirts in time for the Persian New Year, and it was there that their son Abolhassan, the future first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was born.
The Banisadrs were well acquainted with two other prominent religious families, the Khomeinis and the Sadrs. In the 1930s Ruhollah Khomeini liked to visit Hamadan in the summer to take the cool. “I met Khomeini as a child,” Abolhassan recalled of his playdates with the cleric’s young sons Mostafa and Ahmad. As a teenager he might have been expected to follow his father into the seminary. Abolhassan’s great teenage passion was not religion but politics. “My last days of high school coincided with the Mossadeq era,” he remembered. “That led to activism at an early age. I was a nationalist. I was in favor of independence and liberty. I was a Mossadeqi.” It was a thrilling time for a young boy fired with dreams of nationalism, secularism, and Cold War neutrality. “As a student I saw many of my classmates sympathized [with the Communists],” he said. “But I was convinced the Tudeh were Russian stooges.” He sharpened his debating skills during hours of discussions and by eleventh grade was out in the streets circulating petitions in favor of oil nationalization. Whereas loyalists of Tudeh looked to Stalin for leadership, Banisadr favored the more nationalist and moderate left-wing National Front, and he idolized Mohammad Mossadeq.
The events of August 1953—Operation Ajax and the Shah’s brief exile followed by his triumphal return to power—proved turning points. Bitterly disillusioned with U.S. policy toward Iran, a generation of left-wing students such as Banisadr saw the Americans as the latest in a long line of imperialist occupiers dating back to antiquity. “The monarchy was against independence. We were convinced it was used as a staging ground for the foreign powers. I personally became a republican the day after the 1953 coup d’état.” In the late fifties he joined the underground National Resistance Movement and spent two short spells in jail for political offenses. “We would write tracts, do anything to show our resistance to the coup d’état.”
Though he identified as a socialist, Banisadr never renounced religion and admired Shiism’s sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed. In 1963 he watched in fascination as his father’s old friend Khomeini began openly criticizing the Shah’s social and economic reforms. Many students and intellectuals supported Khomeini not because they opposed women’s rights or land reform but because they envied his ability to bring many common people out into the streets to demonstrate against the Shah, whom they blamed for the ouster of their hero Mossadeq. “It was not known then that Khomeini played a role in 1953 against Mossadeq,” Banisadr later grimly conceded. “We [only] understood afterward that he stood with those who supported the coup.… At the time [in 1963] we had no real knowledge of his views.”
* * *
THE WHITE REVOLUTION referendum passed with 99 percent support, providing the Shah with a clear-cut victory and earning him a laudatory telegram of congratulations from the White House. But the results were clouded by reports of voting irregularities and the decision by the marjas to call for a boycott. Nor were Khomeini’s hard-liners about to concede defeat. They smarted from the Shah’s ill-tempered denunciation of them as a “stupid and reactionary bunch whose brains have not moved.… They think life is about getting something for nothing, eating and sleeping … sponging on others and a parasitic existence.” In a second venomous speech, he denounced rebel ulama as “sordid and vile elements … a numb and dispiriting snake and lice who float in their own dirt … the fist of justice, like thunder, will be struck at their head in whatever cloth they are, perhaps to terminate their filthy and shameful life.”
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1963 sporadic clashes occurred in Qom between pro-Khomeini seminarians and the security forces. The Shah’s public attacks against his religious opponents made it all but impossible for the moderate clerical majority to stand up to Khomeini, and momentum quickly shifted to his extremists, who spoiled for a showdown. Tensions ratcheted up still further when paratroopers stormed through the Feiziyah, the seminary attached to the Holy Shrine of Fatima, one of the most sacred sites in all of Islam. They assaulted the young seminarians and wrecked their rooms. At least one student fell to his death from a high rooftop. Then the troops lit a bonfire in the courtyard and fed the flames with turbans, books, and furniture. All of Qom was traumatized by the raid. “With this crime the regime has revealed itself as the successor to Genghiz Khan and has made its defeat and destruction inevitable,” declared Khomeini. “The son of Reza Khan has dug his own grave and disgraced himself.” He issued a defiant call to arms: “I can summon a million martyrs to any cause.”
The Shah and his government had good reason to believe they could maintain order and forestall a religious revolt. Khomeini was not a marja but a lowly ayatollah. His supporters were fervent but still few in number. Middle-class Iranians, the workers, and the farmers were excited by the White Revolution and the promise of prosperity, education, and medical care. They showed no sign of turning against the one man who stood for progress and reform. “We did consider the possibility of violence,” recalled Parviz Sabeti, who in 1963 was a young Savak analyst responsible for monitoring religious dissent. “But we didn’t anticipate it spreading among the people.” The problem, he said, was that although the Shah “spoke in a very tough way [against the ulama] he didn’t follow through with actions. He should have crushed them.”
Ayatollah Khomeini made his move on June 3, 1963, which in the lunar calendar fell on Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Muharram and the fateful anniversary of the death of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680. The security forces had discovered that Khomeini planned to deliver a speech critical of the Shah on the grounds of the martyred Feiziyah school. They surrounded Qom with six thousand paratroopers and dispatched an emissary, Colonel Nasser Moghadam, who tried and failed to persuade the Ayatollah not to proceed. By the time Khomeini arrived at the Feiziyah in the afternoon to address the crowd, the streets surrounding the shrine were thronged with thousands of admirers. “Let me give you some advice, Mr. Shah!” Khomeini declared, addressing the King much as a headmaster might scold an errant schoolboy. “Dear Mr. Shah, I advise you to desist this policy and acts like this. I don’t want the people to offer thanks if your masters should decide one day that you must leave. I don’t want you to become like your father.” Khomeini warned that the Americans were fickle allies, “friends of the dollar; they have no religion, no loyalty. They are hanging responsibility for everything around your miserable neck!… I feel anxiety and sorrow at the state of Iran, at the state of our ruined country, at the state of this cabinet, at the state of those running our government.”
Khomeini’s fiery words electrified his devotees, who acclaimed the speech as the “Second Ashura.” They swept into the streets calling for the overthrow of the Shah and smashing and burning symbols of the regime and modernity. Police and soldiers rushed to downtown Tehran to secure the parliament building and protect the palace from mobs who chanted, “Death to the dictator!” The speed with which the violence spread caught everyone by surprise. Members of the Imperial Family not already at Saadabad for the summer were evacuated to safety in the north. Queen Farah and her two young children, Crown Prince Reza and Princess Farahnaz, were driven in a convoy to Saadabad. The young mother had only recently given birth to her daughter. “The tension was evident even in our immediate environment: this year the king had us go earlier than usual to Saadabad Palace in Shemiran, far from the center of town,” the Queen recalled of those dark days. “I remember that as I tightened my arms around our little Farahnaz, then only three months old, I noticed that the guards had put on combat uniforms.”
* * *
ON THE EVENING of June 4, 1963, Prime Minister Alam summoned to his office the heads of the different branches of the security forces. With the country on the brink of a religious revolt he warned them he was about to order the seizure of Ayatollah Khomeini, an act that he assumed would lead to open clashes in the streets. “Tomorrow is going to be very crucial,” he advised the officers. “The fate of the country depends on us and how the generals behave.” Everyone in the room understood the implication—they should be prepared if necessary to use live rounds to prevent the overthrow of the monarchy.
“Mr. Prime Minister, are you asking us to shoot people?” inquired Lieutenant General Mozaffer Malek, the head of the National Gendarmerie.
Alam took this remark to mean that the general would refuse an order to open fire on the demonstrators. He angrily ordered Malek to leave the room and telephone his deputy to come and replace him. General Hassan Pakravan, the head of Savak, intervened on his colleague’s behalf. “Mr. Prime Minister, General Malek didn’t mean that,” he offered. The generals, he explained, were confused because only their commander in chief, the Shah, could give the order to shoot. When Alam said nothing it dawned on the men in the room that the Shah had removed himself from the line of command: everyone now understood that their own commander in chief was unwilling to issue an order that might lead to civilian casualties.
Alam was understandably on edge. What the generals did not know was that he had just helped steer the Shah through a crisis with striking similarities to the showdown ten years earlier with Mossadeq. Fearful of issuing the order that might result in deaths and injuries, once again the Shah had procrastinated. But where the earlier crisis had been allowed to drag out for months, this time Alam took matters firmly in hand. His intervention steadied the Shah’s nerves even as rumors spread that he was on the verge of packing his suitcase and repeating his earlier flight into exile. “He was panicking,” confirmed Parviz Sabeti, who spent the crisis at the side of General Pakravan. “But he wasn’t ready to leave. He didn’t know what to do because he didn’t want to kill people. There was no talk of the Shah leaving. But he dreaded the prospect of bloodshed.” Ten years earlier, General Zahedi had stepped in to save the day; now Alam took charge and issued the order for the army to use force if necessary to prevent revolution. “I had to,” Alam confided years later to the British ambassador. “His Majesty is very soft-hearted and does not like bloodshed.” “I was determined to make a stand since the very survival of our country was at stake,” Alam told a courtier. In public the prime minister told a different story. “His Majesty was as a rock,” he later told the English writer Margaret Laing. “I could really feel that I could rely on that rock.… Therefore when I proposed to His Majesty ‘Do you allow me to shoot? To order shooting?’ he said ‘Yes, not only I allow, I back you.’”
The great revolutionary drama unfolded in the early morning hours of June 5, 1963. As Alam predicted, news of the arrest of Ayatollah Khomeini unleashed a storm of protest. In Tehran, mobs surged through the center of town and besieged the national radio station, parliament, ministries, and the Marble Palace. “They had no plan [as such] to take over,” recalled Sabeti. “They targeted the radio station so they could make a broadcast to the nation and provoke a popular uprising.” Similar tactics had been tried in 1953. Rumors flew that as many as a hundred thousand people were in the streets, but the security forces estimated only one-fifth that number were in open revolt. Still, the authorities were shocked by the scale and ferocity of the unrest. Though Alam radiated outward confidence, he was painfully aware that the fate of the dynasty and the country rested in his hands. His usual routine was to take an afternoon nap after lunch. “My stomach was upset,” he later reminisced. “I thought I would throw up. I was scared. I thought, ‘If I don’t take my nap that bastard attendant will go out and tell people, “The Prime Minister is too upset to take his nap today.”’” So Alam stuck to his usual routine, pretending to nap though “too nervous to sleep.” When he dressed to return to his office he found his attendant in a state of near hysteria: “Mr. Prime Minister, how can you take a nap when the city is burning?!”
By midday, Khomeini’s followers were on the rampage in the cities of Mashad, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Kashan. Plumes of smoke rose high over the Tehran skyline. Arsonists and rioters approached the center of town from four directions in a well-coordinated assault that suggested careful advance planning. “In the Ministry of Justice, files were burned, the Ministry of Interior was wrecked, [and the] office of News and Broadcasting was destroyed,” reported American diplomats from the stricken city. The building that housed the newspaper Ettelaat, which had criticized Khomeini, was saved from destruction only by troop reinforcements. “Police stations were destroyed, petrol stations fired, telephone lines ripped up, phone booths destroyed, buses and bus stations were destroyed … this had obviously been well planned and the targets were both strategic and places hated by many of the people … there was relatively little looting, although deliberate destruction of government property.” The municipal library, built with American money, was burned. Repeated attempts were made to storm the perimeter around the Marble Palace, but the palace guard stood their ground and prevented a massacre.
With Iran’s cities put to the torch, Prime Minister Alam drove to National Police headquarters to issue the order to clear the streets. He erupted when he saw that his driver had concealed his license plate to prevent their car from being identified and possibly targeted by rioters. “Eat shit!” snapped the prime minister. “If there is one day I need to be seen driving into town it is today!” The convoy encountered no problems, and Alam was met at police headquarters by Police Chief Nematollah Nasiri and General Gholam Ali Oveissi. Alam made a few light quips but then turned deadly serious. “Who has the guns?” he asked his commanders. “I don’t know why you’re not using them. I want to save Tehran.” Martial law was declared, troops began moving through the streets, and the crackle of rifle fire was heard through that night and into the next day. When one squad of troops phoned General Nasiri asking for reinforcements, he responded that the only assistance they could expect from him were trucks to collect bodies. Wild rumors spread of thousands killed, but the actual death toll turned out to be much lower. Whereas the Shah and his advisers were told that about 120 people died, after the revolution the Islamic Republic’s Martyr’s Foundation surprised everyone by scaling down the final death toll to 32. Some of the casualties had been policemen and gendarmerie fired on by rioters.
Prime Minister Alam’s decisive action had saved the day. But even he was left uneasy by the sight of troops firing on religious students. “It was not an easy decision for me,” he admitted. “I too was raised by a devout mother.”
* * *
WITH LAW AND order restored, the Shah faced the dilemma of what to do with his nemesis. The call for leniency came from a surprising direction. Two years earlier Hassan Pakravan had succeeded General Teymour Bakhtiar as head of Savak after Bakhtiar fled the country amid charges of coup plotting. Pakravan had banned the use of torture and opened a dialogue with the regime’s critics, who included many leading clerics. Queen Farah admired Pakravan as “a man of great culture, intelligence, and humanity, who pleaded clemency to the king.” Though Pakravan was not personally religious he was wary of doing or saying anything that might provoke more unrest in the mosques. “He said he knew that, after all, the population of the country is not its elite,” recalled his wife, Fatemeh. “It’s the real people. They are not very literate. They are simple. They are full of superstition. And even though most of the Iranians have no respect for the mullahs, they still have [respect] for what they represent.”
The Ayatollah’s courage in standing up to the regime marked him as a potent threat for the future. He was detained on an army base while the Shah and his advisers debated what to do with him. The list of available options ranged from execution, imprisonment, and exile to freeing him without conditions. Pakravan’s aide Parviz Sabeti, who closely followed the deliberations, dismissed speculation that execution was ever seriously considered. “If it was discussed I didn’t hear about it,” he said. The regime was not prepared for, nor could it afford to risk, a second explosion of religious violence and more martyrs. These concerns were shared by the marjas. Regardless of their feelings about the Shah’s reforms, the marjas loathed Khomeini for provoking bloodshed and stirring unrest. They regarded his interest in politics as heresy and his demagoguery as a threat to the entire religious establishment. Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, the most influential marja living inside Iran, took the lead in brokering a settlement with the regime. Shariatmadari, who bore a striking resemblance to the British actor Alec Guinness, had taught Khomeini when they were in seminary school together in Qom and was well versed in his ambition and fanaticism. He came up with an ingenious plan that he hoped would placate the ulama, satisfy the palace, and tame the radicals.
Shariatmadari led a procession of senior religious figures to Tehran to publicly petition the Shah to spare Khomeini’s life. Behind the scenes, the Marja worked with Alam to come up with a compromise formula that would allow both sides to back down without losing face. Shariatmadari’s subsequent decision to elevate Khomeini from the rank of ayatollah to the exalted status of grand ayatollah was made with the full knowledge that no king of Iran would dare execute a senior member of the ulama. “Khomeini is a grand ayatollah like us,” he declared. Alam and the Shah accepted the formula as the price of peace. Nor was Khomeini given a say in the matter: Shariatmadari wanted him to feel indebted to his colleagues and hoped the promotion would satisfy his drive for power. Now the whole of Qom would know that the moderates had “saved” Khomeini’s life. Better yet, his new title was tainted because he had not earned it on his own merits. This and his reputation for extremism made it highly unlikely he would ever be acclaimed as a marja. Prime Minister Alam noted that even while the marjas negotiated they discreetly signaled that “their appeals [on behalf of Khomeini’s life] should be disregarded.”
General Pakravan went to great lengths to make sure the newly styled Grand Ayatollah Khomeini was treated with respect and held in comfortable surroundings. After a few weeks he was transferred to a spacious guesthouse and spared the indignity of a formal interrogation. Pakravan even made a point of lunching with his “guest” once a week. Khomeini was polite to his jailer, and the atmosphere between the two men was outwardly cordial. Together they discussed religion, history, and philosophy. “He is very handsome,” Pakravan told Fatemeh when his wife peppered him with questions about the man from Qom. Like others in the ruling class, she was fascinated by the clergyman who had come so close to toppling the King. “He has extraordinary presence, a power of seduction. He has great charisma.” He described Khomeini’s most striking trait as “ambition. You know, it made my hair stand on end. It was frightening.” Pakravan described Khomeini as immune to reason and logic. “I felt like a helpless wave, smashing my head against solid rock.”
The Shah accepted the arrangement that spared Khomeini either execution or a lengthy prison sentence for treason. In response, Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari released a conciliatory statement declaring that the ulama were not “reactionaries opposed to liberty and progress” and that they would support “genuine reforms.” He did, however, call for “social justice and the implementation of the Constitution.”
Grand Ayatollah Khomeini was released from detention in April 1964. He received a hero’s welcome back in Qom, where tens of thousands of people cheered and danced in the streets. He had the crowds with him. “Khomeini is now an important national figure that the regime must handle with extreme care,” the U.S. embassy cabled Washington. The Americans had anticipated an uprising from the Communist left but never considered the possibility of a threat from the religious right. Iran’s highly complex interplay of religion, politics, and intrigue was beyond their understanding. Hossein Mahdavy, a leading figure in the National Front, which had been sidelined by Khomeini’s revolt, warned diplomat William Green that the Shah and his government “greatly underestimated” the strength of religious feeling among the common people and the loyalty they felt to the marjas.
One admirer who did not travel to Qom to welcome Khomeini home was Abolhassan Banisadr. “I had a phone call from [Khomeini’s eldest son] Mostafa to tell me that his father had been released,” he said. But Abolhassan’s father, Ayatollah Banisadr, said he would make the trip instead—he did not want his son to get picked up by Savak—and it would be another nine years before Banisadr and Khomeini met to plan the overthrow of the monarchy.
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THE SHAH TOOK advantage of the 1963–1964 crackdown to make a crucial decision. After years of lurching from one political crisis to the next, impatient to put his reforms in place, he decided to seize the reins of executive power in his own hands and establish personal authoritarian rule. Since 1955 he had involved himself in politics but essentially shared power with his prime ministers while meddling in cabinet affairs. From now on, however, Iran’s prime minister, cabinet, and parliament could question and debate his decisions but otherwise not oppose them. The events of June 5, 1963, which became known as Fifteen Khordad, had proven the last straw. Never again would he allow a strong personality or demagogue to emerge as a threat from within the ranks of the clergy, the military, or the political class. There would never be another Mossadeq, Zahedi, or Khomeini to threaten the ruling dynasty or distract him from his mission to develop and modernize Iran on his own terms and at his own pace.
The Shah was unapologetic: “Finally I became so exasperated that I decided we would have to dispense with democracy and operate by decree.” His decision to rule without cultivating the support of the political establishment carried risks and made him dependent on the army to stay in power. “Having successfully stripped his traditional supporters of power, the Shah has come as near to a monopoly of power as at any time in his reign,” the U.S. embassy informed Washington. The Americans concluded there would be no repeat event: “Whatever the ups and downs of the Shah’s future relations with the mullahs, it seems clear that the standard bearers of Shia Islam as it exists today in Iran are fighting a losing battle.” The Shah’s own advisers were less confident. They warned of the risks involved in shutting down legitimate political activity and involving the Crown in government. Five years earlier, former prime minister and court minister Hossein Ala had been instrumental in ending the Shah’s marriage to Queen Soraya. Now he convened a meeting of grandees to plead the case for restraint. They worried that Alam’s crackdown had gone far enough. The regime could not afford to alienate the clergy, students, intellectuals, and the urban middle class who recoiled at the prospect of dictatorship. The Shah was furious when he learned of their meeting. He suspected they were plotting and saw to it that all but one of the participants was sacked from office. Ardeshir Zahedi, now Iran’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in London, wrote his father-in-law a long letter urging him to reconsider and slow down. “I urged His Majesty to reign and not rule,” he explained, “because the risk was that he would be blamed when things went bad, like the economy. The White Revolution was not well thought through. I told him, ‘When you paint a new house, you have to clean it first, and then you paint it in layers. You have to get rid of the old paint first. I have to tell you, something is wrong. Khomeini is like a cancer.’”
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RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI COULD not stay quiet—it was not in his nature.
The next crisis arose in 1964, when under intense pressure from Washington the Iranian government quietly announced plans to approve legislation that would provide legal immunity to U.S. military personnel, their family members, and household staff stationed in Iran. President Lyndon Johnson’s administration placed a high priority on a Status of Forces Agreement between the two countries. Privately, the Shah and his advisers expressed deep concern. With their history of colonialism, Iranians were deeply sensitive to any suggestion that foreigners should receive special privileges or be exempted from the laws of the land. Washington’s insistence that the flow of military and economic aid to Iran was contingent on passage of the law showed staggering insensitivity toward their ally, who had just put the lid on revolt. As an incentive, Johnson offered a $200 million loan to purchase additional military hardware. Iranians predictably reacted with widespread outrage to what they regarded as a “capitulation bill” with bribes attached. The parliamentary debate over the proposed legislation reopened old wounds still unhealed from Operation Ajax and completely undermined the Shah’s efforts to calm passions and reassert his authority in the wake of Khomeini’s rebellion.
On October 27, 1964, Khomeini stood outside his home in Qom and delivered a thunderous second attack on the Shah and the Pahlavi state. This time he ventured beyond religion to appeal to the people’s sense of nationalism and pride, savaging the King and his ministers as a nest of traitors. “They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog,” he protested. “If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him.” Khomeini called on all sections of Iranian society to revolt. He also issued a dramatic pan-Islamist call to arms. “Ulama of Qom, come to the aid of Islam! Muslim peoples! Leaders of the Muslim peoples! Presidents and kings of the Muslim peoples! Come to our aid! Shah of Iran, save yourself!… O God, destroy those individuals who are traitors to this land, who are traitors to Islam, who are traitors to the Quran.”
This time the government did not wait for the popular reaction. Within a week Khomeini found himself bundled onto a Royal Iranian Air Force Hercules bound for Turkey and a life in permanent exile. For the first eleven months he lived with the family of Colonel Ali Cetiner, a Turkish intelligence officer, until the Iranian government agreed that he could move to Najaf in Iraq, where they could keep a closer eye on him. Colonel Cetiner was sorry to lose his houseguest. He thought how strange it was that the man who left his house was the same in every respect but one. “When he arrived from Iran he did not have a penny on him,” recalled the colonel. “But when he left Turkey in November 1965 he was a millionaire, even by the standards of those days. He was given money by visitors from Iran. Khomeini left Turkey with his fortune and went to Iraq.”