Wake up! Pay some attention to reality and the questions of the day.
—GRAND AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI
I always had in mind the Romanovs.
—QUEEN FARAH
In his place of exile a world away from the Ruritanian scenes of splendor unfolding in the Shah’s capital, the old man was up before dawn and for the rest of the day kept a routine so exact that locals in Najaf liked to say they could set their watches by his daily walk to the holy shrine. After rising at five to pray, and breakfasting two hours later on cheese, bread, and nuts, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent the morning catching up on the latest news, reading books, writing lectures, and meeting with admirers and aides. The midday prayer was followed by lunch; a long nap; and more reading, writing, and meetings. The workday ended at five, when family members joined him for a half-hour stroll. After a modest dinner and evening prayers, then more reading and writing, the lights were dimmed at ten. “Even we were affected by his discipline,” said one young admirer who later served as Khomeini’s bodyguard. The Grand Ayatollah’s rigid focus, work ethic, and modest diet were if anything reminiscent of the man he sought to destroy, and like the Shah he went to great lengths to conceal his true nature from the Iranian people, whom he also believed instinctively preferred strongman rule. “In private meetings,” recalled his bodyguard, “he was very happy and joking. But at the same time, when he had public meetings he was stern and unsmiling.”
Khomeini brooded and contemplated his future. “I do not know what sin I have committed to be confined to Najaf in the few remaining days of my life,” he complained during his first bitter years in the dusty town. Living in a foreign country surrounded by Sunni Arabs, isolated from his admirers, shut off from everything he knew in Qom, the Grand Ayatollah referred to himself as “this old man who is spending the last moments of his life.” The Pahlavi regime hoped that the longer Khomeini remained out of the public spotlight, the greater the chance he would fade from memory. Savak’s Parviz Sabeti infiltrated his household with informers. General Nasiri informed the Shah that “the old shark has had his fangs pulled out.” Now in his midsixties, the Grand Ayatollah faced the very real prospect that he would never set foot in Iran again, let alone live to see the destruction of the Pahlavi Dynasty.
Najaf’s clerical establishment regarded Khomeini as an interloper and viewed him as an unwelcome troublemaker. Grand Ayatollah Mohsen Hakim, Shiism’s paramount marja, made his feelings clear when he publicly snubbed the newcomer upon his arrival in Iraq. “Najaf, like Qom and Mashad, was a center of intrigue and gossip at the best of times,” wrote Khomeini’s biographer. “Religio-political rivalry is as intense among the Shia clergy as in any political party and sometimes borders on the childish, with grand ayatollahs refusing to speak to each other. With their lives of loyalty that resemble those directed by tribal chieftains rather than spiritual elders, the great Shia religious centers have always looked like a confederacy of fiefdoms.”
During one of their rare encounters, Grand Ayatollahs Hakim and Khomeini debated the merits of launching a second rebellion against the Pahlavis and their White Revolution. In the Shia tradition there was no more epic religious narrative or morality play than the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his family at the hands of the wicked Caliph Yazid at Karbala in AD 680. Hakim disputed Khomeini’s claim that the Shah had become the new Yazid and that the ulama had a duty to lead a second revolt against the Iranian monarchy.
“If we staged an uprising and people suffered there would be chaos and people would curse us,” Hakim warned. Though Khomeini had gained infamy for his leadership role in challenging the Shah, his fellow marjas still commanded greater support among the people.
“When we staged the uprising it only raised the esteem in which we were held,” Khomeini challenged Hakim.
“What should be done?” replied Hakim. “We must balance our actions against the result. There is no point in sending people to their deaths.”
Khomeini argued that deaths were exactly what the revolutionary movement needed. Martyrdom was to be celebrated and welcomed, not feared or discouraged. “We must sacrifice our lives,” he retorted. “Let history note that when religion was in danger a number of Shia ulama stood up to defend it and a group of them were killed.”
* * *
REBELLION OF A different kind was brewing in the palace.
Less than eighteen months after Princess Shahnaz was seen weeping at her father’s coronation, the Shah decided his daughter was “full of crazy ideas,” so crazy indeed that he questioned her sanity and threatened her with disinheritance. With her finely sculptured cheekbones as though carved from marble, her father’s expressive brown eyes, and a striking physical resemblance to the ill-fated Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, Princess Shahnaz was as beautiful as she was restless. Her marriage to Ardeshir Zahedi had crumbled following the couple’s return to Tehran after years abroad representing Iran in London and Washington. Ardeshir’s rapid ascent through the ranks continued with his appointment as foreign minister. His former wife chose a very different course. Like so many young educated Iranians from well-to-do families, in the late 1960s Princess Shahnaz embarked on a quest for personal and spiritual self-enlightenment that led her to the great love of her life and the man many royalists would later blame for helping seal the fate of the dynasty.
Khosrow Djahanbani was the son of a respected former general who had served Reza Shah as the heir to one of Iran’s great families. The Djahanbanis were related to the Qajar princes and princesses and circulated in the highest echelons of Pahlavi society. Khosrow’s brother Nader was a dedicated air force pilot, beloved by his men, and so good-looking that he earned the moniker “the blue-eyed general.” Khosrow, with his wild mane of coal-black hair, angular good looks, and penetrating eyes, cut an equally dashing if decidedly more mercurial figure. He returned home from several years spent studying in New York and affected the mannerisms, dress, and louche drug habits of a Greenwich Village hippie. His admirers and critics attested to his handsome, brooding charm but also his danger and arrogance. Djahanbani moved around town with northern Tehran’s beautiful young things, the sons and daughters of prominent businessmen, public officials, and generals who dabbled in pseudo-Marxism, indulged in cocaine, hash, and heroin, and entertained utopian fantasies about throwing in their lot with the working class and joining the barricades for a republic that would presumably abolish their titles and privileges and take away their trust funds. In choosing Khosrow Djahanbani, Princess Shahnaz could not have taken a more unsuitable lover, though that was undoubtedly part of his allure. To her father’s consternation, Shahnaz adopted Khosrow’s lifestyle and financed the couple’s habits with the stipend she received as his daughter.
Every effort the Shah made to separate the couple only strengthened the girl’s willful determination to be with her lover. Djahanbani’s conscription into the army backfired when he was court-martialed and imprisoned for a minor offense, so that by the early summer of 1969 the Shah’s firstborn child could be found standing in line each morning outside Tehran’s main prison awaiting the start of visiting hours. The Princess, who made no effort to cover her head or otherwise disguise her appearance, emulated her lover as she would a marja so that she no longer cared what people thought. When Djahanbani was transferred to a second prison, outside Tehran, Shahnaz exiled herself to Switzerland and wrote her father a letter declaring her intention to marry the convicted criminal. Matters came to a head in the first week of August 1969 when Djahanbani was released from prison to avoid public scandal. His lover returned from Geneva for one final attempt at winning her father’s approval for marriage. On the evening of August 5, Alam instructed the Imperial Guard to prevent Djahanbani from entering the princess’s residence until he had arrived to escort her to Niavaran to see her father. To his fury, he learned the released felon had already made his way inside the house. Alam ordered the commander of the guard to enter the property and expel Shahnaz’s lover, by force if need be. But Shahnaz told him over the phone that if Djahanbani was taken away she would join him. Alam begged her to avoid confrontation and scandal. She finally backed down but only on the condition they spend another hour in each other’s company. Alam agreed and in the event was kept waiting until three in the morning for the lovers to finish.
The next morning the exhausted Alam received Djahanbani at Saadabad. To his surprise, the young man promised “to abandon his hippyfied ways and face up to reality.” Father and daughter held a separate meeting elsewhere in the palace and their reunion also went better than expected. The Shah assured the Princess that he loved her and promised not to stand in the way of her happiness even if her heart was set on marriage. All he asked was that she show respect for her family, whose public reputation was threatened by her scandalous behavior. Like Khosrow, Shahnaz agreed to change her lifestyle. The two older men were relieved at the outcome, sure that the two youngsters had sobered up to their familial responsibilities. But six weeks later, following a lovers’ quarrel, Shahnaz took an overdose of sleeping pills. She was revived just in time, and the couple was reunited.
Court Minister Asadollah Alam asked the question on the everyone’s mind: “Where on earth is this love affair going to lead us?”
* * *
IN JANUARY AND February 1970, while the Shah, Queen Farah, and their children left Iran for an extended forty-day ski vacation in Switzerland—far longer than usual—Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini delivered a series of thirteen lectures to seminary students in Najaf that laid out his blueprint for the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic state.
In his lectures, known colloquially as the velayat-e faqih (“guardianship of the jurists”), Khomeini challenged the conventional belief within Shiism that Islamic religious scholars should remain above the social and political fray and that the laws of Islam “remain in abeyance or are restricted to a particular time or place” until the return of the Hidden Imam, twelfth successor to the Prophet Mohammad. Khomeini bolstered his case by pointing out that the Prophet had not only founded a religion but also led a government and commanded an army. By this logic, the only individuals qualified to make, interpret, and implement laws were the mutjahids (religious scholars). They, and not any king, or president, or constitution, were the only acceptable guardians of the state until the Hidden Imam returned to usher in the end of days. Any form of government that was not Islamic in character was therefore illegitimate and must be annihilated: “We have in reality, then, no choice but to destroy those systems of government that are corrupt in themselves and also entail the corruption of others, and to overthrow all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive, and criminal regimes.”
Khomeini ferociously rejected the 1906 constitutional settlement and declared his intention to bury it once and for all. In that vein he expressed disgust with the mainstream moderate religious establishments headquartered in Qom, Najaf, and Mashad. By discouraging their followers from entering politics the marjas and grand ayatollahs were little more than “pseudo saints” and “negligent, lazy, idle and apathetic people.” “Wake up!” he sneered. “Pay some attention to reality and the questions of the day. Do not let yourselves be negligent. Are you waiting for the angels to come and carry you on their wings? Is it the function of the angels to pamper the idle?” True Islam, in Khomeini’s rendering, was not moderate or mainstream or quiet—anything but. True Islam “is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to truth and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.” He all but challenged his eager young followers to return to their seminaries, overthrow their teachers, and launch a cultural revolution.
[The ulama] must be exposed and disgraced so that they may lose whatever standing they have among the people.… Our youths must strip them of their turbans.… I do not know if our young people in Iran have died; where are they? Why do they not strip these people of their turbans? I am not saying they should be killed; they do not deserve to be killed. But take off their turbans! Our people in Iran, particularly the zealous youths, have a duty.… They do not need to be beaten much; just take off their turbans, and do not permit them to appear in public wearing turbans. The turban is a model garment; not everyone is fit to wear it.
Khomeini’s plainspoken delivery, rough street language, and call for violence resonated with young militants in the late sixties and early seventies, a time when university campuses and high schools around the world were in open revolt against authority. Among Iran’s educated youth population—prime beneficiaries of the Shah’s reforms—the air was thick with talk of revolution against his authoritarian, pro-American regime. Iran was an old country with a youthful population. In 1970 an estimated 54 percent or 14.5 million Iranians were aged under twenty-four years and thanks to the White Revolution were on average the most literate generation in the country’s history. As their families moved through the ranks of the middle class, and as they gained an education, many young Iranians who a generation earlier might have toiled in the fields had the luxury of focusing on broader philosophical issues and indulging in politics. They were inspired by events in the region. Though they were not Arab they could hardly be unmoved by the staggering setbacks their fellow Muslim brethren had suffered in recent years. For many Muslims, Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War shattered the belief that Western ideas held the key to a prosperous and just future. With the old panaceas—nationalism, socialism, and secularism—identified with failure and humiliation, their search for solutions led many young Muslims, Sunni and Shia alike, back to the mosque and the old ways.
Disillusioned with the West, young students and intellectuals rediscovered Islam with all the fervor of first-time love. A new generation of leftist scholars, most notably Iran’s Ali Shariati, helped bridge the gap between Marxism and Islam by explaining that the Prophet Mohammad had also emphasized social justice, brotherhood, and opposition to tyranny. Shariati’s interpretation of Islam as a revolutionary belief system proved a drawing card for throngs of young liberals and leftists who associated the Pahlavi monarchy with dictatorship, state repression, censorship, and foreign interference. Iranian students blamed the United States for propping up corrupt regimes throughout the Middle East to ensure a plentiful supply of cheap oil, support for Israel, and containment of the Soviet Union and Arab regimes. Their teachers encouraged their cynicism by reminding them of the American role in the overthrow of the martyred Mossadeq, which had ended Iran’s messy postwar experiment with democracy and paved the way for the Shah’s royal authoritarianism.
The real radicalization of Iranian youth took place outside Iran’s borders. Each year the Shah spent $50 million to send his country’s best and brightest to the United States and Western Europe to learn the skills needed to modernize Iranian society. The students’ time in America coincided with the explosive events of the late sixties, when the United States was rocked by urban riots, social movements, street protests, and political assassinations. Caught up in the spirit of people power, the students returned home to a still deeply conservative Muslim society where strict censorship was enforced, drug traffickers went to the firing squad, and secret police informants sat in their classrooms. In 1970 the U.S. embassy was concerned enough about the emergence of a leftist fifth column to conduct a study of Iranian youth opinion. “The liberal states of Western Europe and North America are measures by which young Iranians judge themselves and their society,” it concluded. “Thus, as elsewhere in the world, most of the educated youth in Iran dislike living in what they see as a totalitarian society. They deeply desire the civil liberties which are standard in the United States and other Western nations; they are annoyed that their newspapers are censored and controlled, their activities subject to secret police scrutiny, their movements (particularly in and out of the country) under heavy control, and the free public expression of their personal freedoms forbidden. They regard these aspects of Iranian society and government as a direct creation of the Shah.”
Young, politically astute Iranians admired Ruhollah Khomeini as the only public figure who had stood up to the Shah and paid the price for his principles. Though they knew very little about him, the young idolized Khomeini as an Iranian Che Guevara, imbuing him with a leftist revolutionary aura based on their own naive hopes for a better tomorrow. The Iraqi authorities who kept the Grand Ayatollah under observation were more apprised of his true nature. Iraqi intelligence chief Sadoun Shakir informed his French counterpart, Count Alexandre de Marenche, that Khomeini was “a terrible character” with the personality traits of a “medieval tyrant.” Shakir passed along a report of a disturbing incident that had recently involved the Grand Ayatollah and a neighbor’s child.
One day, a child of his family had a fight with a neighborhood youngster. [Khomeini] wanted the boy who had dared raise a hand to his offspring to be put to death.
* * *
BEFORE HE BECAME the public face of Savak, Parviz Sabeti earned his law degree at the University of Tehran. Bright and exceptionally well-read, with ambitions to enter political life, at twenty-two he went to work for the security organization as an intelligence analyst in the hope it would serve as a springboard to enter government. His intelligence and acumen so impressed his employers that within five years he was appointed to head the agency’s political reporting unit. “Our task was not only to fight the opposition but to fight injustices and corruption within the system,” he said. “The cycle of popular grievance led to actions [by the security forces] and then counter-actions [by the opposition]. We had to break the cycle.”
In the aftermath of June 1963 Iran’s senior security officials reorganized Savak with the goal of anticipating and preventing another bout of revolutionary unrest. The Iranians accepted an Israeli recommendation that they merge the separate offices responsible for collecting and processing intelligence. The next year Sabeti was put in charge of the new Office of Anti-Subversion, which fell within the jurisdiction of Savak’s powerful Third Directorate, headed by General Nasser Moghadam. Moghadam was the same officer who had tried and failed to persuade Khomeini not to deliver his Ashura speech. He reported directly to General Nasiri, who had replaced General Pakravan as Savak’s new chief, and both men enjoyed reputations as hard-liners within the security forces. Moghadam’s Third Directorate was responsible for domestic security and for monitoring the activities of subversive groups as well as farmers and workers. Separate directorates were devoted to the National Front and its Islamic offshoot, Mehdi Bazargan’s Liberation Movement of Iran; the Kurdish minority; other minority separatist groups, including Arabs, Baluchis, and Turks; Iranian students abroad; domestic religious radicals; and the Fedayeen and Mujahedin terrorist groups. Khomeini lived in exile, but Sabeti regarded him as a domestic threat and kept tabs on him, too, infiltrating his household with informers who garnered information on who he saw and what he said and wrote.
Savak agents gathered intelligence on subversives but also on officials whose behavior and activities they believed posed a threat to public confidence. Sabeti and Moghadam were particularly concerned about the corrosive effects of corruption. Years earlier, Prime Minister Fazlollah Zahedi had warned the Shah that in the absence of a strong parliamentary executive the monarch would be held personally responsible for scandals and failures. To prevent that from happening Savak monitored the business activities, financial dealings, friendships, and sex lives of members of the Imperial Family in addition to government ministers, senior military officers, business executives, the ayatollahs, and poets, writers, playwrights, and entertainers. Government ministries were infiltrated with informants and subjected to investigations. The head of state was not immune from Savak’s prying eyes. When Sabeti discovered that the Shah was seeing women in a safe house near the palace, he took action. “I often used to see the Shah driving to this house [near Niavaran] at three in the afternoon,” he said. “I started asking around and soon found out what was going on. My concern was security. I thought the house was too exposed, so I made sure security in the area was tightened.”
The Shah made certain that the intelligence service remained in loyal hands. Nematollah Nasiri, born in 1910, had first made the acquaintance of Crown Prince Mohammad Reza at the prestigious Officers’ Academy. Later, he served as a lieutenant with Hossein Fardust, the Shah’s confidant since childhood, and it was Fardust who selected him to help guard the royal palaces when political unrest boiled over in the early fifties. Nasiri played a key role during Operation Ajax, when he was arrested on August 15, 1953, while trying to serve Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq with his letter of dismissal. The Shah rewarded Nasiri’s loyalty by promoting him to the rank of three-star general and appointing him to lead the national police. In June 1963 it was Nasiri who enforced Alam’s shoot-to-kill order that earned him the title “Butcher of Tehran.” Two years later, when the Shah swept aside his father’s advisers, Nasiri received the Imperial warrant to replace General Hassan Pakravan as head of Savak. Nasiri was loyal to a fault, though not regarded as especially creative or original in his thinking. That suited the purposes of the Shah, who had no intention of hiring a Mark Antony to run his secret service.
Nasiri had a taste for the finer things in life. “He parlayed his power into wealth and illicit gains not only for himself and his allies, but for his family,” wrote one critic. He earned a fortune in real estate and invested in industrial farms with Hossein Fardust, once his patron and now his deputy at Savak. While Sabeti and Moghadam rooted out corruption, their superiors enriched themselves at the public trough. It was hardly a surprise that Nasiri went to great lengths to protect the names of his business associates and others cashing in on Iran’s economic boom. “Any time I wrote reports on the Shah’s family and friends,” complained Parviz Sabeti, “Nasiri wouldn’t take them to him.” The general transformed Savak into a personal empire whose grip extended deep into every sector of society as well as into government ministries, embassies, and universities. In the early seventies he personified the agency’s Orwellian reputation as all-knowing, all-seeing. But no spy agency could see or know everything, particularly when the men at the top were censoring themselves.
* * *
AS A BOY, Hossein Fardust had been selected by Reza Shah as a companion for his son, and he had accompanied the young Crown Prince of Iran to boarding school in Switzerland.
When the Shah reshuffled Savak’s top leadership in 1965, he appointed his oldest friend, Fardust, to the highly sensitive post of deputy director to make sure he had his own “eyes and ears” in the agency. Fardust’s job was to report to the monarch each day with summaries from the different directorates. One biographer described him as “the ultimate ‘clearinghouse’ for all reports [and he] had his hands on the pulse of the country.” Fardust struck most observers, including Queen Farah, as a rather strange and mysterious fellow, the sort of courtier who lurked in the shadows and prowled the palace corridors, scuttling into and out of anterooms, and entering and leaving meetings without feeling the need to say a word to anyone. His influence was such that everyone at court, from the Queen and the commanders of the armed forces on down to the lowliest palace courtier, believed that Fardust’s opinions and instructions carried the full weight of the Shah and were to be carried out accordingly. Like his friend General Nasiri, Hossein Fardust was not especially smart, bright, or cultured. He shambled when he walked and was “notorious for wearing the same shirt and shoes for long stretches of time.” Despite his attempts at modesty, however, Fardust’s business dealings with Nasiri made him a very wealthy man.
The Shah refused to hear a word said against his old school chum. He dismissed as slander the rumors and reports that Fardust was in the pay of either the Russian or the British intelligence services. “They can’t even let me have one friend,” he grumbled. He trusted Fardust to the point that he told his wife to consult him if she ever needed to corroborate information or could not obtain satisfaction elsewhere in government. The Queen was aware of the stories that Reza Shah had selected Fardust to accompany her husband to Le Rosey and then decided he didn’t like him. Reza Shah had discouraged his son from making friendships, with the predictable result that he grew up to be a generally terrible judge of character. The Shah had a tendency to push away smart, capable people who genuinely had his best interests in mind and surrounded himself instead with men such as Fardust and Nasiri, feckless mediocrities who exploited and manipulated their proximity to the throne for self-interest. In the case of Fardust, the viper at the breast nursed a bitter, vengeful grievance. He had never forgotten his origins as the son of a poor soldier taken away from his parents at a tender age to serve the most powerful family in the land. One interpretation is that he associated his royal service with a form of psychological imprisonment. “He grew to despise all those whose birthrights granted them advantages in life,” wrote Abbas Milani. “Envy became a permanent part of his emotional vocabulary. Yet he spent nearly all his life serving someone whose very right to rule—and to lord it over him—was an accident of birth.” From an early age he had learned to tell the Pahlavis what he thought they wanted to hear. The first lies he told were as a boy on the tennis court—he fibbed when he assured Reza Shah that his son the Crown Prince was his superior in tennis. His habit of covering up, dissembling, and deceiving escalated from the tennis court to the palace. This, then, was the twisted personality of the dark soul who presented the Shah with his daily portrait of conditions inside the country. In his personality and motives, Hossein Fardust had all the makings of a traitor.
Perhaps it was not surprising that when the Shah read the Third Directorate’s periodic reports on corruption and policy failures he was often too quick to blame the messenger. Since childhood he had avoided dealing with unpleasantness and bad news to the point where he tore references to the Arab invasion of Persia in the seventh century out of a school textbook. In the palace he dismissed as spoilers the few brave officials who tried to bring evidence of mismanagement and corruption to his attention. “Why is Savak pushing so much negativity?” he complained to Fardust. “Go and see what is wrong with Sabeti and Moghadam. What are their family backgrounds like? Why are they the only ones complaining?” He was so used to receiving optimistic assessments of Iran’s progress from Nasiri and Fardust that he wondered if their two underlings suffered from psychological problems. “I didn’t blame His Majesty but Fardust [for not telling him the truth],” said Sabeti. “I told Fardust that he needed to explain to His Majesty that it was not our job to tell him good news.” Fardust’s solution was typical: he advised Sabeti that in the future he should edit his intelligence reports so that any bad news was balanced alongside the good. But even then the Shah complained that his reports were too negative, sniping to Court Minister Alam that Savak’s most senior and talented intelligence analyst was most likely a CIA plant. Alam did nothing to allay his paranoia. He, too, feared and resented Sabeti—agents from the Third Directorate compiled damaging material on his own extralegal commercial investments and properties.
Yet by age thirty-five Parviz Sabeti had become Iran’s untouchable man. No one could match his breadth and depth of knowledge on conditions inside Iran, the regime’s strengths, and its vulnerabilities. His intelligence on opposition groups, terrorist networks, and dissidents was unmatched. His files contained the most intimate secrets of anyone of any consequence at court, in government, the mosques, and in the bazaars. The Shah knew this and warily kept Sabeti, the regime’s “Mr. Security,” at arm’s length—the two men met each other on only one occasion—but he knew how much Nasiri depended on Sabeti’s skills as an analyst to succeed. Sabeti emerged from the shadows on three separate occasions in 1969 and 1970, when he appeared on national television to explain the activities of the Third Directorate to the Iranian public. Television viewers were struck by Sabeti’s telegenic looks, sharp intellect, and soft-spoken demeanor—he was no one’s idea of a ruthless secret police operative. The decision to raise Sabeti’s public profile had another quite remarkable and unintended consequence.
“Farah knew me from television,” said Sabeti. “The people around her asked her to call me. I told her, ‘I want to see you. But not without His Majesty’s permission.’ She asked, he approved, and we met for the first time in 1970 at Nowshahr on the Caspian. Our meeting lasted five hours.”
* * *
THE DIARY OF Court Minister Alam revealed that on May 9, 1970, he accompanied Queen Farah on a day trip to Mashad. She had a complex relationship with Alam, her husband’s oldest, devoted, and most indispensable adviser. Farah was painfully aware that it was Alam who arranged the Shah’s afternoon trysts with young women in a safe house near the palace. She bridled at his sycophantic behavior and worried that her husband, shy, isolated, and surrounded with flatterers, risked losing touch with the realities of daily life in what was still a poor country with serious social and economic challenges to overcome. Alam was loyal to the point of servility. “He is very, very independent,” he once said of the Shah. “You know, a man who is missioned by the gods, how can he choose a model for himself?”
On the flight back to Tehran the Queen asked Alam if she could talk to him alone. Though she blamed him for pandering to her husband she still appreciated his loyalty, discretion, and political acumen. She also knew he shared her concerns about the behavior of the Shah’s relatives. “In general I get the impression that Her Majesty fears for the future, and not without cause.” Farah was sensitive to the widespread perception that her husband’s brothers and sisters used their titles and connections to advance their own interests. “In general,” the U.S. embassy observed in a devastating 1970 assessment, “young people in Iran, like other Iranians, find the numerous members of the Royal Family, other than the immediate family of the Shah, a shadowy and vaguely distasteful group. Innumerable rumors and occasional substantiated accounts, which are in circulation in Iran, produce, particularly among Iranian youth, a general image of parasitism, constant corruption, and personal laxness.”
The wives of Reza Shah had between them produced seven sons and four surviving daughters. “The Shah had too many brothers and sisters,” said Fatemeh Pakravan. “That’s not good for a king. Not good at all.” He kept them firmly in their place, restricting their ability to play any role in public life. “We never spoke politics in family gatherings,” confirmed Prince Gholam Reza, the Shah’s half brother, who was respected for his involvement in the army and sporting life. “I was His Majesty’s Special Inspector for the Army. This position was important at the beginning as I could report directly to His Majesty, but in the last few years this was changed. I kept the title but had no real impact.” His wife, Princess Manigeh, a Qajar princess, was not allowed to hold official patronages, which were reserved solely for Queen Farah and the Shah’s sisters. The prince recalled that as children the Pahlavi siblings were raised in separate households so that relations between them “were never shown in a warm way. We had no casual gatherings together. It was always a bit official between us. We avoided talking Iranian politics as it could be considered interfering in government decisions or influencing this or that. I’m not exaggerating by saying not a word.” The prince recalled that Princess Shams maintained her own social circle and kept to herself, while Princess Ashraf “had the best parties and was a very interesting lady. There was always very good conversation and she had very bright mind. We always had a very good time in her place.” He was personally closest to Prince Ali Reza who was “as a twin to me. We loved each other and made lots of things together. His loss [in a plane crash in 1954] for me remains very painful. Prince Abdul Reza was very sportive and a very good hunter, very elegant and refined. Princess Fatemeh was very sociable, down to earth and sportive. She was also a helicopter pilot. Prince Hamid Reza was fun and smart. When he was younger he would hide under the car from his own guards. He liked to go out and have fun—he had a good sense of humor.”
Denied any official role, the Shah’s brothers and sisters entered into commerce; jockeyed for proximity to the throne; and lobbied for favors, appointments, and increases in their stipends. The Shah’s view was that largesse was a small price to pay for keeping them out of trouble. If his siblings enjoyed the perks of status, then all the better. Dispensing favors and money was the Shah’s way of keeping his fractious siblings onside but also led to jealousies and resentments. No member of the Pahlavi family aroused more public animosity than Princess Ashraf. The CIA described Ashraf as one of her brother’s “most ambitious supporters and one of his major liabilities during most of his career.” After her brother consolidated power in the midsixties the Princess’s interests moved from politics to business and she entered into a series of highly lucrative business partnerships to build residential and commercial developments. The Princess “has not hesitated to use her influence to obtain government contracts for her friends or acquaintances willing to pay her a fee. In recent years … she no longer demands a pay-off from contractors but only comments that she would be happy to be able to rely on them should it ever be necessary.” Though reports of her involvement in the drug trade were based on “scanty evidence,” they too had become “a fixture in the catalogue of charges against the Pahlavis.”
The CIA report was based on the usual Tehran tittle-tattle and contained few if any proven facts and even less original analysis. Talk of the Princess’s influence was vastly exaggerated, not only in government but also in her charity work. Much of the enmity directed at female members of the Pahlavi family in particular originated with men troubled by their influence in a conservative Muslim male-dominated society. Everyone who knew Ashraf attested to her humor, passion for life, and above all her devotion to her brother. Her extensive patronage of charities and philanthropies mainly reflected her staunch support for women’s rights, a cause that stirred resentment from the ulama. The Princess built a powerful network of loyalists within the regime who kept her informed at all times. Yet there was no doubting her tenacious, opinionated personality or her business acumen. Her intrigues against the Queen, whose liberal tendencies she distrusted, caused so much havoc that in the late sixties her brother, who usually retreated from personal confrontations, sent her into exile to cool off. She returned to find her influence at court greatly diminished and Farah in the ascendant.
Princess Ashraf’s first, brief marriage, to Ali Qavam, had produced a son, Shahram, described by U.S. intelligence as “a wheeler-dealer” invested in twenty holding companies that ranged from transportation, nightclubs, and construction to advertising and distributorships. The holding companies were set up, the CIA reported, to provide cover for “quasi-legal business ventures.” Prince Shahram’s “most flagrant act of irresponsibility,” according to the agency, was a smuggling operation that involved “the sale of national art treasures and antiques, notably the gold artifacts from Marlik, a prehistoric archeological site of great significance.” According to U.S. intelligence, the loot was ferried out of Iran in his mother’s name to evade inspections by customs officials. Ashraf was stunned and humiliated when she learned of the ruse and gave orders to put an immediate end to it. The companies were wound up and her affairs were put in order, but the Princess’s reputation with the Iranian public never recovered from the scandal, and her standing with her brother and sister-in-law was further undermined.
The Shah was so angered by his nephew’s behavior that he briefly considered jailing him and then sending him into exile. He relented only in the face of emotional pleas from his sister. The Queen was not nearly so understanding or forgiving. She understood the concerns of middle-class Tehranis who worked hard, played by the rules, and were appalled by official greed and corruption, and she worried that her sister-in-law’s family threatened the Crown Prince’s chances of ever taking the throne. By now Farah was under no illusions about the life she had married into. When she accompanied her husband to the Soviet Union the Pahlavis exchanged knowing glances when their Russian escorts made them linger in the private apartments of the ill-fated Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death with their children by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The Shah understood that the Russians were playing a psychological game and pretended not to notice. His wife followed his cue but couldn’t help identify with the star-crossed couple. Looking around the room, she noted that they had left their possessions behind when the revolutionaries came for them. The trip made an indelible impression. “I always had in mind the Romanovs. I remember thinking, ‘If this happens in Iran, I never want them to say that we took everything away.’”
Queen Farah’s decision to sound out Court Minister Alam during her trip to Mashad in May 1970 marked an important step in her political maturity. Her dissatisfaction with Alam’s response to her concerns about corruption meant that when she returned to Tehran she decided to follow the advice of trusted friends and place a telephone call to Parviz Sabeti, whose appearances on television explaining the role of Savak had also drawn her husband’s close attention. Sabeti agreed to meet with her but only on the condition that she first obtain the Shah’s approval—he wanted the monarch to know exactly what was going on.
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PARVIZ SABETI FLEW to Nowshahr on the Caspian Sea, where the Pahlavis spent the later part of each summer on vacation. He found the Queen in a state of great anxiety. “She was obsessed with corruption,” he recalled. They met alone. The Nowshahr residence was small but somehow Sabeti never caught a glimpse of her husband.
For five hours Sabeti briefed Farah on his findings, providing her with damning evidence of corruption within the Imperial Family and at the highest levels of Pahlavi society. “I spoke against corrupt courtiers and family members,” said Sabeti. He rattled off the list of names in his usual cool, perfunctory manner and spared no one. By the end of their exhausting session Farah grasped the magnitude of the problem and the powerful forces arrayed against her. The scales had finally fallen from her eyes. The Queen was stunned. “She cried hard,” remembered Sabeti. “She asked, ‘How can my son become king if this is going on?’”
After their first encounter the Queen kept in close touch with Sabeti, phoning him to arrange for the delivery of reports and seeking his advice. She also used their back channel to intercede on behalf of citizens who contacted her office claiming they had been falsely accused of dissident political activities. Sabeti was generally amenable to her requests, though they bickered over specific cases. More meetings followed. Over the next several years they held at least two lengthy sessions specifically devoted to corruption, and on both occasions the Queen again wept in despair. But Farah was also galvanized into action. She started asking questions and pursued her own lines of inquiry. She showed a closer interest in the workings of the Imperial Court and government. Another time, Farah asked Sabeti to prepare a report on the corrupt business practices of a prominent leader of the Tehran trade guild who happened to be a protégé of both Hoveyda and General Nasiri. She said she intended to raise the matter with her husband in the hope that he would take action. “It took three days to write,” said Sabeti. “I gave it to her. It was a very long report.” The Queen handed the report to her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, gave it first to Hossein Fardust, who then presented it to General Nasiri. The next thing Sabeti knew, Nasiri summoned him to his office and in the presence of one of Fardust’s aides informed him point-blank that the contents of the report he had compiled were categorically false. “It’s all wrong,” said Nasiri, and sent him smarting back to his office.
Two days later, Farah telephoned Sabeti. She said her husband had embarrassed her by discounting the corruption allegations in their entirety. “Mr. Sabeti, the report you gave me was all wrong,” she said. He could tell by the tone of her voice that she was distressed. They met the next day, and Sabeti explained to her what had happened. The confidential report he had prepared for her eyes only had been handed over to his superiors—the same men he had accused of malfeasance. “Now, I have to say it is all wrong,” he patiently explained. Realizing what had happened, the Queen wept with frustration and offered to help Sabeti secure a meeting with her husband so he could present the evidence in person. She telephoned him from a small resort area beside a lake outside the capital. “His Majesty has offered to see you,” she said, sounding optimistic. “We will be together.” Sabeti insisted that he see the Shah alone because “He won’t let me talk frankly about his sisters and brothers with you in the same room as me.”
The Queen helped Sabeti prepare for the meeting, which they both hoped would focus the Shah on the need to confront his brothers and sisters and purge his inner circle of corrupt elements. But in the end the Shah backed out of the meeting. Shy, averse to bad news, and surrounded by loyalists who had their own reasons for encouraging his distrust, the monarch declined his wife’s request to meet alone with Sabeti. In so doing he missed a golden opportunity to learn more about the corruption that was already starting to gnaw away at public confidence in the regime.
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PRINCESS SHAHNAZ MARRIED Khosrow Djahanbani in the winter of 1971 at Iran’s embassy in Geneva, an out-of-the-way location dictated by the bride’s embarrassed father. The Shah instructed Alam to prevent the transfer of his daughter’s financial assets out of the country and to bar the groom from ever showing his face at court. Iranian law stipulated that drug offenders face the firing squad, and the couple’s hedonistic lifestyle made him appear a hypocrite. “As her father I may be able to forgive my daughter her mistakes, but as Shahanshah of Iran I can never accept a good-for-nothing as my son-in-law,” he said. “It would imply that I am willing to condone his morals.” Princess Fatemeh represented the Pahlavi family at the wedding ceremony. The couple, wearing elegantly tailored caftans, their long hair falling loose over their shoulders, wept, smiled, and held each other during their vows. Shahnaz had never looked more lovely or more happy.
In the months leading up to his marriage, Khosrow Djahanbani had moved into the house of his fiancée’s cousin Prince Patrick Ali, the Shah’s nephew by his late brother Prince Ali Reza, who had died in a plane crash in 1954. The young prince dabbled in religion and was under the influence of a fundamentalist Islamic preacher who saw an opportunity to make a spectacular conversion. Patrick Ali was not alone in turning to religion. In 1971 U.S. diplomats reported “an unexpected growth of interest in religion among a small segment of youth in Iran, especially those studying and teaching in the universities.” The Islamist Union was strong on all campuses “and attendance at the Tehran University Mosque is continually increasing.” The embassy concluded that youth interest in religion was “basically conservative in nature” and a backlash against the White Revolution, which emphasized the use of American and European ideas, technology, and personnel. “A small number of students have also embraced religious orthodoxy as a means of criticizing the Shah and his method of rule in Iran,” read the report. “Criticism of the Shah which might be unacceptable in a secular context, can often be voiced under cover of an interest in strengthening the role of religion in Iranian life.”
Savak generally left the mosques alone. With Khomeini in exile and his lieutenants underground or in prison, and Iran’s mainstream ulama solidly anti-Communist and in receipt of generous state subsidies to reward their quiescence, there seemed little reason for the secret police to harass the clergy. That made the mosques even more attractive to leftists, who saw them as sanctuaries for political activity. Through their contacts with the mullahs some students did rediscover and embrace religion. Mostly they were allies of convenience who could offer shelter and support while they fomented plans to overthrow the Shah and replace the monarchy with a republic. Both sides set aside religious and philosophical differences for the greater good of the struggle against what they saw as injustice and repression. “The banning of political parties, the turning of the Parliament into a club for sycophants, the muzzling of the press, and the continued underdevelopment of trade unions and other associations, deprived society of its natural means of self-expression and political activity,” wrote an Iranian political commentator. “This led to a gradual return to the mosque as a multipurpose institution that could counter the inordinate expansion of the state as a super institution.”
The U.S. embassy decided that Islam did not pose a threat to the Shah or to Iran’s essentially pro-Western orientation. If anything, the “conservative, inward looking, and antiforeign basis for the revival of interest in religion among the young educated classes” actually precluded it from becoming a “force for change in the country” because the country was moving inexorably toward a future that was modern, liberal, and secular. “It is necessary to re-emphasize that this growth in interest is on a small scale and affects an extremely limited percentage of the student body. It is interesting, however, as an indication of one of the possible paths reaction against Westernization and modernization can take in Iranian society.”